SARATOGA SPRINGS — A Saratoga Springs neighborhood has pitted itself against the Utah Department of Transportation after realizing UDOT's plan to widen a road includes paving over a portion of the neighborhood's community park.

"We need the road," said Larry Johnson, a neighborhood resident. "But why do they have to cut into our beautiful landscaped park when there's an open field across the road. It doesn't make sense."

The 60-foot-wide park stretches for a mile tucked between backyards in Saratoga Springs Development and the city's main artery, Redwood Road. The park buffers the 730-home subdivision from speeding vehicles and occasional spring flooding with rolling grass berms several feet high.

When residents discovered UDOT's intentions this winter to purchase a 10-foot-wide strip along their park, which includes a meandering jogging path, they immediately cast their eyes westward and wondered, "Why?"

When Teri Smith looks west, out her back window and across the narrow park and Redwood Road, she sees open fields, seemingly desolate and clay-clumped after a wet winter.

"It's frustrating," Smith said. "Why can't they (UDOT) take a little more land on that side and leave our park alone."

Instead of slicing several feet into their park, residents are petitioning UDOT to pave over 20 feet of the field on the opposite side of the road, which is owned, and planted annually, by the Corporation of Presiding Bishopric, a welfare service arm of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Scott Thompson, UDOT project spokesman, said he understands residents' concerns but said shifting the road's centerline 30 feet "doesn't make good engineering sense." He also said it would be costly to move utilities but didn't say how many or which ones.

Purchasing a land strip from the welfare farm to save the park land, Thompson said, would amount to six acres, costing taxpayers $600,000 and the LDS Church valuable cropland.

Thompson didn't say how much money might be saved by using the landscaped park section — which UDOT plans to re-landscape.

For every 10 feet UDOT acquires on the farm side of the road, the welfare organization loses about 1.3 acres of cropland, according to area calculations from Utah County land records.

Even if UDOT completely gave in to resident pressure and diverted the road from the park, land records indicate UDOT could only go about 60 percent of the park's length before also having to purchase larger pieces of land from a planned subdivision and its roadside park on the other side of the street.