After decades of waiting, Antelope Island State Park visitor center is getting a $13 million makeover
After state officials and lawmakers secured $13 million in funding, Antelope Island State Park is ready to complete the second phase of its visitor center building project. And it’s only taken around a quarter-century.
The Utah Division of State Parks and the Friends of Antelope Island hosted a kickoff event Friday officially announcing the development plans to stakeholders and media, who were sitting mere feet away from where the new building is supposed to be built.
The park’s current visitor center was built in 1996 and represented the first phase of the project. In the decades since, however, the planned second phase never materialized due to a lack of funding.
The need to expand became more urgent as the island was flooded, not with water but with an increasing number of visitors in recent years. So many that the current center couldn’t keep pace with the demand. The state park had more than a million visitors in 2021, said Park Manager Jeremy Shaw, making it the third most visited state park in Utah.
He doesn’t foresee visitation dropping anytime soon.
“With the development in Syracuse, the West Davis Corridor is going to have an off-ramp on to Antelope Drive,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune, “and so by the time that’s done, I would say our visitation could push upwards to 2 million.”
The growing capacity problem, along with an unusually large sum of money the state had to appropriate this year, encouraged the Legislature to allocate $1 million to the project in 2021 and another $12 million this year.
“Luckily for us, we have the president of the Senate from Layton and the Speaker of the House from Kaysville,” Rep. Stephen Handy, R-Layton, who spearheaded the funding effort in the Legislature, told the Tribune. “They know the island. They knew this needed to be done, and it was just a matter of timing to access the available funding.”
The money is enough to completely redesign the existing visitor center, which will serve as an “education center” going forward and the addition of a new building that will add thousands of square feet to the center.
The addition will include an amphitheater where visiting students can gather, a new drop-off area and an entrance plaza, according to a news release.
Perhaps most importantly, the money will allow the center to incorporate permanent research workspaces where scientists and students can gather to study Great Salt Lake. Shaw said the park already has agreements with most colleges in the state to conduct research at the facility.
“What better place to educate those people about the importance of this lake than here, where they can stand and learn about it and look at it at same time?” Shaw said.
Trying to save the disappearing Great Salt Lake was a legislative focal point during the 2022 General Session. A group of lawmakers, including Handy, took a bird’s-eye tour of the lake in February, driving home the point that the lake might not always exist.
At the time, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said, “The last trip out to Antelope Island that I made, looking back … it didn’t look like an island much anymore,” he told reporters. “And I think that’s a real concern.”
In that way, the Legislature is getting double the bang for its buck with its $13 million in appropriations: helping one of its most popular state parks with its tourism overflow while also drawing more attention to the vanishing landmark that surrounds it.
Shaw told those at the news conference that it took 19 days for park staff to identify vehicles with a license plate from every state that had visited the park. But support, he said, was going to need to come from more than just the United States.
“We’re going to get global support through this effort,” he remarked.
The design work for the project has already begun, and the funding needed to start construction is set to become available on July 1. Shaw said that if everything goes to plan, he could see the new center being ready by mid-summer of 2023.
The visitor center overhaul is only one of the changes the state park has undergone recently. A new campground – including amenities such as paved RV parking and hookups, flush toilets, showers, BBQ grills, and shelters — was also added to Bridger Bay last year.
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- People tour the Antelope Island State Park Visitor Center on Friday, April 8, 2022. The same day, the Utah Division of State Parks announced that the center will be renovated and expanded to meet the growth of the park, which had over 1 million visitors last year.
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- Great Salt Lake Collaborative