Ivory and Dahl also have been talking with officials of the University of Utah's Research Park, which abuts park boundaries, proposing a 50-year lease on a 12-acre site above the event center and 500 feet from the Brigham Young farmhouse. That idea was brought up at a June board meeting. The property could lease to the Associated Regional and University Pathologists (ARUP) for an administrative building and parking lot.

Combined, the facilities could bring in an estimated $800,000 annually: $400,000 in rent from the event center and $400,000 for the lease from the research park. And with board approval, those dollars could kick in two years from now, Ivory said.

But Friday, the board decided to continue studying the ideas and other options to bring in a steady money flow for maintenance and operations. The vote for more study thrilled Diane Barlow, Sunnyside East Community Council vice president.

Barlow and roughly a dozen other residents attended the meeting. Many heard preliminary plans of the two projects in a meeting with park leadership and didn't want to see Emigration Canyon turned into a concrete jungle.

"This quadrant of the city is already very short of open space. We just see open space being eaten up," Barlow said.

For some time, the village has kept open only 12 of its 46 period homes due to slack funding. So Barlow asks: Why build another?

"I strongly believe that until we can utilize the buildings we have currently, it seems silly to build more buildings."

Other attendees agreed and also took issue with the historical accuracy of proposed additions, such as the train and playground.

"Some board members have lost sight of the fact that this is a living history museum. It's not an amusement park," said JaynAnne Meads, a member of the nonprofit group Pioneer Heritage and a former park employee.

But Dahl and Ivory see the expanded programming as adhering to their main focus: educating, entertaining and providing accessibility.

They are most excited about the visitor center and the trains, the latter a pet project the two have researched for months. The trains are replicas of the locomotives that met in 1869 nose-to-nose at what is now the Golden Spike National Historic Site, linking railroads from the East and West.

"We're trying to overcome the biggest struggles we've had here at the park," Dahl said, noting the trains will move people around the village's steep and sometimes rough terrain.

Already in six months, DNR's Pearson said, the park has come a long way.

But now, "We have to focus on the bottom line," he said. "We can't just decide we'll open the doors and they will come. It hasn't happened in the past."

Ivory, whose own daughter and grandchildren volunteer at the park, said volunteer hours are already up 60 percent over last year, but it's not enough to keep up the large park.

"We've run a very, very lean operation this year. We've been operating on 13 full-time people all summer in order to make this thing work economically," Ivory said. "Next year, this is going to have a lot of bang. It's going to be fun."

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E-mail: astowell@desnews.com