The draft report is available online — www.governor.utah.gov/planning/jrnaf.htm and www.planning.utah.gov/jrnaftrail.htm — and the forum wants the public's response. Comments can also be submitted online or sent to Williams at jeff.williams@ut.usda.gov. Comments will be accepted until Friday.

The first two areas of priority in the forum's report are an unpaved section of trail between 3700 South and 3900 South and an area near the Salt Lake County-Utah County border where 400 feet of trail was washed out in fall 2003. Those two chunks received top priority because they were seen as the easiest to fix. The report says each could be finished within a year if the trail completion project is started.

The stickiest section of trail is a nearly mile-long area between 8600 South and 9000 South where land ownership and right of wayissues with nearby land owners — Utah Power and the Fur Breeders Agricultural Co-op — could hold up the project for years to come.

The draft report recommends dealing with that section in two phases. The first would be a temporary fix that would be part of the second wave of completion work. It would divert the trail to 700 West as it passes the area. The trail would then head back to the river and join the rest of the trail. However, there remain concerns because 700 West is a fairly busy road and planners ultimately want trail-users to be able to stay next to the river.

Jeff Salt, president of the Foundation for the Provo-Jordan River Parkway, has voiced concerns in the past about the trail moving too quickly. He worries that planners are creating "redundant trails," which include offshoots and branches of the trail that often pop up because "someone wants a trail from their back porch," he told the Deseret Morning News in November.

"We want to make sure that any trail completion projects maintain respect for environmental and natural resource issues and also deal with the issue of redundant trails and overlapping or redundant trail facilities, such as too many trailheads and too many bridges," he said Friday.

But at this point, he sees money as a top concern.

"We need to emphasize for purposes of funding opportunities with the Legislature that this trail is really a very important trail system to complete because it's the most used and most nearly complete trail system on the Wasatch Front," he said.

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E-mail: dsmeath@desnews.com