By admin 
El Dorado Hills Community Services District staff recommended Wednesday that the district abandon a bike park project after more than four years of planning.
Read more Grass Valley drug bust nets cocaine, meth; suspected dealer arrested
The district’s principal planner, Daniel Savala, said the planning department had underestimated the cost of the Silver Dove Bike Park by around $2 million.
The plan included bike trails for all skill levels, a nature walk and a community orchard, among other amenities. It was formally approved by the district’s board of directors in late 2023 after a consulting firm hired by the district estimated the project would cost around $3.4 million in a conceptual plan.
Since then, the district had spent around $400,000 on planning, civil engineering and soil testing. The money came from the district’s park impact fees, which are paid by new developments.
Savala said the district would have to reconsider what to do with the parcel at Silver Dove Way and Bass Lake Road.
The announcement came as El Dorado Hills faced ongoing scrutiny over the district’s financial management.
For years, residents have said that the district’s lighting and landscaping district assessment process is unfair. The county has also expressed concerns — and in 2023, the county auditor-controller refused to collect the assessments, citing concerns about their accuracy.
In 2024, the found that the district had overcharged the public in fees was irresponsibly holding large cash reserves without funding improvements.
Stephanie McGann Jantzen, general manager of El Dorado Hills CSD, said is was trying to right the ship after being appointed to the position in June.
“What I want to do here is clean up some swings and misses,” she said Tuesday.
When principal planner Savala joined the district’s staff in March, McGann Jantzen asked him to review the district’s existing projects.
He immediately discovered a “red flag” in the Silver Dove Bike Park plan, Savala told the two directors on the Parks and Planning Committee during their Wednesday meeting.
That led him to dig deeper into the plan created in 2023.
He found that the department had failed to provide the board with complete information before it approved the project nearly three years ago.
“You just didn’t have a full picture of what it would take to develop this park,” Savala told the committee on Wednesday.
Read more FBI stops former Rep. Eric Swalwell at SFO to seize his cellphone, laptop
The department’s original plan underestimated the cost of nearly every element needed to construct the park, according to a report submitted to the committee.
Some underestimates were discovered during additional testing that the district completed in 2024, after the park plan was approved in 2023.
For example, a geotechnical report found shallow bedrock on the parcel and concluded that mechanical jackhammering or even blasting would be required to grade the site. That led to a jump in estimated cost — from $40,000 to between $200,000 and $500,000.
But district staff should have been more thorough in assessing the project and should have discovered potential issues before asking the board to approve it, McGann Jantzen said.
“The study of the feasibility of the project, there needed to be more done,” she said. “And so obviously there wasn’t.”
“I don’t fault the board for that,” said McGann Jantzen. “That’s a staff level issue.”
For example, the original plan by the department’s consultant assumed that the park would have access to a sewer main and allotted about $76,000 for a routine sewer connection. Staff later learned that there was no sewer main nearby. Instead, the project would require a septic tank, adding $50,000 to $200,000 to the estimate, the report said.
The plan also underestimated the cost of road improvements mandated under a 2016 county ordinance that required new development projects to make improvements along the property’s frontage, such as curbs, gutters and sidewalks. The plan budgeted about $106,000 for the work, but the estimated cost ranged from $331,000 to $666,000, according to the report.
The original budget assumed that the parcel was within the El Dorado Irrigation District and that only a routine water connection, estimated to cost $51,000, would be required. Staff later learned that the park was not within the irrigation district. To receive public water service, the report said, El Dorado Hills would have had to undergo a lengthy county process to formally annex the property.
Staff had paused that process, the report said, but it estimated that the water connection would cost between $101,000 and $201,000.
“It is disappointing to kind of find all of this out now,” CSD board director Michael Martinelli said at the meeting. “It’s unfortunate that we are at this stage now knowing this.
Martinelli and CSD board director Noelle Mattock directed the planning department to return with new ideas for the park that would stay within the original budget while putting the land to use.
Read more Dominguez sent to state hospital as Davis stabbing victims’ families confront loss
This story was originally published August 20, 2026 at 11:58 AM.