Fresno is very close to building a trail extension to connect Woodward Park to the Palm Avenue GB3.
The Fresno City Council on Thursday authorized an application for $5.1 million in state climate-bond money toward a long-planned extension of the Lewis S. Eaton Trail into the River West area along the San Joaquin River. The grant — a fraction of the project’s roughly $23 million construction estimate — now goes to the San Joaquin River Conservancy’s board, which votes Wednesday on whether to award it.
In essence, the City Council asked the River Conservancy to apply revenues from Proposition 4, the $10 billion climate bond California voters approved in 2024, to the north Fresno project. State funds from the bond go directly to the Conservancy, a state agency, who is now in the position to disburse the money to build Fresno’s long-awaited park at the river-edge of Palm Avenue.
If approved, the core project will be fully funded, Kari Daniska, executive officer of the Conservancy, said in a text message.
The $5.1 million the city is applying for is the maximum size of grant available, according to the city resolution. The full construction estimates filed with the council put the total project cost at $23.3 million across two phases, and this grant gives them enough money to start the first phase.
Wednesday marks the end of nearly 10 years of paperwork: Fresno and the River Conservancy have been working in tandem on the trail since the Conservancy certified its environmental impact report in November 2017.
Will access to the San Joaquin River improve?
Today, the existing 4-mile Eaton Trail runs near Friant Road from the Hallowell River Center south to the northwest corner of Woodward Park at Highway 41, where it dead-ends at the freeway.
Beyond the Highway 41 underpass lies a 358-acre stretch of public land along the San Joaquin River — a riverine patchwork of grassland, ponds, riparian woodland, legacy gravel-mining pits and fenced stormwater basins, hemmed by a residential subdivision atop the bluffs to the south and bookended on the west by Spano Park, a passive city mini-park near Palm and Nees avenues with picnic tables, a grassy lawn, and views of the Sierra Nevada.
River West would extend the existing Eaton Trail roughly 2.4 miles to Spano Park — giving Fresno residents much-needed access to all that beauty.
The trail is slated to be a big one — a 22-foot-wide multipurpose corridor, including a 12-foot paved surface and an 8-foot hard natural surface for horse and bike use.
Three trailhead parking lots need to be built — at Perrin, Riverview Drive and the end of North Palm Avenue. For public transit-heads, a bus turnaround is included too.
The council also adopted a second addendum to the project’s 2017 environmental impact report, a CEQA cleanup needed to fold in roughly 320 feet of sidewalk and an accessible curb ramp beneath the Caltrans overpass at Perrin Avenue.
That short pedestrian seam — modest as it sounds — physically links the eastern and western halves of the trail across the freeway barrier.
Engineer’s estimates filed with the council pin Phase 1, which covers the trail itself, a parking lot at Perrin and stairs at Palm Avenue, at roughly $13.7 million. Phase 2 — parking at Palm and Riverview and the bus turnaround — comes in at $9.6 million, for a total construction cost of around $23.3 million.
Fresno’s general plan, adopted in December 2014, directs the city to support extending the Eaton Trail into River West. The Conservancy’s Parkway Master Plan, first approved in 1997 and updated in 2018, envisions a 22-mile recreational corridor between Friant Dam and Highway 99.
If the Conservancy board signs off Wednesday, Daniska said, the timeline becomes more clear.
“If this funding is awarded on Wednesday,” she said, “the proposed timeline is to start construction in spring 2027.”
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