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Nine projects appear poised to receive significant funding from a voter-approved bond that will allow Salt Lake County to expand and maintain parks and recreation facilities across the valley.

A few more could join the list — if the County Council opts to raise the amount of the general obligation bond it issues, a bond made possible in 2014 when voters overwhelmingly extended the tenth-of-a-cent Zoo, Arts and Parks (ZAP) tax for another decade.

County financial officials believe the value of the bond, pegged at $75 million two years ago, could go up to $90 million without raising the tax obligation on residents.

That's because Salt Lake County is one of a handful of counties nationwide with a AAA bond rating, and with interest rates where they are, it can get more bang for its buck, said county finance boss Darrin Casper.

Every penny can be easily justified, said Mike Peterson, one of 17 members of the ZAP Recreational Facilities Advisory Board, which evaluated 30 projects seeking funding from the bond, whose annual payments will be made with revenue from ZAP's parks portion.

"If we had unlimited funds, we could justify funding for every one of these applications," he added. Their bottom lines totaled $181 million.

The committee, however, was operating on the idea that it had $50 million to work with because the County Council pledged to reserve a third of the $75 million bond for maintenance of existing facilities.

But after two rounds of assigning point totals to each application based on specified criteria, the committee could not get any lower than $57 million in its recommendation. "We realize that's a little more than you said, but that's the motion that was approved," said Peterson, a Cottonwood Heights councilman.

Added Sandy City Councilman Chris McCandless, another committee member: "It's amazing that $57 million doesn't go very far."

Recommended projects, in the order of point totals, are:

Knudsen Nature Park in Holladay • $2.7 million

Pioneer Crossing Park in West Valley City • $3 million

Magna Regional Park • $11.2 million

Cottonwood Heights Recreation Center • $2.4 million

Wheeler Outdoor Education Center in Murray • $2.75 million

Welby Regional Park in South Jordan • $12 million

A trail along the Jordan River • $2.1 million

Another trail in White City along the Sandy canal • $1.6 million

Draper City Recreation Facility • $19.5 million

Peterson said advisory board members recognize that no project is a shoo-in as the process moves to the County Council, which can tinker with the list.

"It's understood that may happen," he said, especially with additional money possibly being available. The council could go straight down the priority list developed by the advisory council and add projects until the money runs out, or it could pick projects here and there because of geographic location or their limited price tags.

"The fact that the [recommendation] was very well thought out," Peterson told council members, "we'd hope you'd use that as a guide."

Longtime County Council members on both sides of the political aisle agreed it's best to develop ground rules for upcoming meetings where the figures are tweaked and decisions made on what is funded and what's not.

"In the past, we've held fairly sacred the recommendations of ZAP advisory boards — credence to the fact you did your homework," said Democratic Councilman Jim Bradley. "A lot can go on between now and the final vote, so there should be a process for any changes that take place."

Republican Councilman Michael Jensen concurred. "We have to have a procedure the nine of us agree on for making additions or subtractions."

If the council chooses to go down the line of the advisory committee's ranked projects, improvements to Big Cottonwood Regional Park in Holladay would be next in line.

Councilwoman Aimee Winder Newton, a Republican who represents the western and central county, noted that five recommended projects are on the east side and only three in the west (the ninth, the Jordan River, is the dividing line).

Peterson said the advisory panel's review process tried to strike a geographic balance that also took into account where money was being spent on deferred-maintenance projects, plus the location of projects from a 2004 bond issuance.

Whatever projects emerge from this process will be welcomed by Parks and Recreation Division Director Martin Jensen. Looking at the potential additions to the county's system made him feel, he said, "like a kid that got the new Montgomery Ward catalog before Christmas."