The Folsom City Council voted 5-0 on April 28, 2026 to move Benevento Family Park into final design and construction bidding. After roughly two decades of stalled budgets, competing concepts, and a fight over how much activity a quiet stretch of Carpenter Hill Road should absorb, the neighborhood's most-delayed park finally has a real path forward.
Read the vote count and it sounds like a done deal. Read the fine print and you'll notice the plan splits into two tiers: what the city has actually committed to building, and what shows up only "if funding allows." The pond, the paths, and the parking lot are locked in. The fishing dock, the full loop trail around the water, and the sand volleyball courts are still waiting on money that hasn't been found yet.
What the council actually signed off on
Benevento Family Park sits on a 19-acre site at the intersection of Broadstone Parkway and Carpenter Hill Road, right next to Vista del Lago High School. The land has three distinct terraces and a stock pond in the middle, the kind of sloped, uneven ground that makes park design more expensive than it looks on paper. About eight to nine of those 19 acres will actually be developed in this first phase.
What's guaranteed in the plan the council approved: walking paths, a natural surface trail around the pond, on-site parking, and restrooms. That's the base scope, the version that gets built no matter what the budget looks like when bids come in.
This is the neighborhood guide entry for Empire Ranch, and it's the same corridor that's already anchored by the golf course and clubhouse at 1620 East Natoma Street. Benevento won't replace that as a gathering spot. It's meant to give the newer streets south of the course their own green space, one that doesn't require a tee time to use.
The fight that took almost twenty years
The land itself was earmarked for a park back in 2018, when the city formally established the Benevento name. What took so long wasn't funding alone. It was disagreement over what kind of park a sloped, pond-centered site next to a high school and a residential street should become.
City staff eventually presented two competing concepts. Concept A kept the upper terraces relatively quiet, a balanced design that could be delivered inside the available budget. Concept B pushed for a more active layout on those same terraces, with additional amenities and parking access, at a meaningfully higher cost. Nearby residents split along predictable lines. Some worried about traffic, noise, and safety if the park leaned more active along Carpenter Hill Road. Others wanted a park that actually served families and students rather than a passive green buffer. Competing petitions circulated, one opposing added parking on Carpenter Hill, another pushing for a more fully programmed space.
The council ultimately built the approved plan around Concept A. Before casting her vote, Councilmember Sarah Aquino summed up the moment:
"This park has to be one and done."
That line matters more than it might seem to. After years of redesigns and paused funding, the council chose the version it could actually finish over the version that would have looked better in a rendering.
What's locked in, and what's still a maybe
The design reveal in December 2025 at the Vista del Lago High School library showed the full vision, pond loop and all. What passed in April is a trimmed version of that vision, split into a base plan and a wish list of bid alternates.
| Guaranteed in the approved plan | Bid alternate, pending funding |
|---|---|
| Walking paths | Fishing dock with pond access |
| Natural surface trail around the pond | Concrete path around the pond |
| On-site parking | Two lighted sand volleyball courts |
| Restrooms |
"Bid alternate" is city budgeting language for an add-on that only gets built if construction bids come in under estimate. In practice, that means the fishing dock and the volleyball courts aren't a promise. They're a possibility that depends on how the numbers shake out once contractors actually price the job. Residents who show up expecting a finished amenity list should know that the base park, not the full one from the December reveal, is what's actually funded right now.
Three down, three to go
Benevento isn't a standalone project. Folsom's own planning documents describe it as the third of six parks planned for the broader Empire Ranch area, part of the city's policy of providing five acres of parkland per 1,000 residents as new neighborhoods fill in.
That framing is useful context if you've lived here through multiple rounds of "someday there will be a park" conversations. It means:
- Two other parks in the Empire Ranch area have already reached completion or a later stage than Benevento.
- Three more are still somewhere earlier in the pipeline behind this one.
- The negotiation you just watched play out over Concept A versus Concept B, over how active a park should be next to a residential street, is likely to repeat itself for whatever comes next.
If you want a preview of how these fights tend to resolve, the base-scope-plus-bid-alternates structure of Benevento is probably the template. Budget-friendly wins the vote. Extras get bid out separately and hope for good news on construction costs.
The calendar you can actually plan around
Nothing changes on the ground yet. The council's vote approved a master development plan, which the city describes as a concept-level roadmap for layout and major amenities, not a final set of construction drawings. Design refinements, environmental review, and construction bidding still have to happen before anyone breaks ground.
The city's current estimate has construction starting in February 2027, with the park opening in spring 2028. That's roughly a year and a half from now for the fences and grading equipment to show up, and closer to two years before you can actually walk the finished trail.
In the meantime, the site stays what it's been for years: a sloped, terraced piece of land with a pond in the middle, mostly unused except by whoever's willing to walk past it. If you're looking for a place to stretch your legs before Benevento opens, the informal 3.7-mile loop that already threads through this stretch of Empire Ranch, past the golf course and the surrounding streets, remains the default option. It's easy, mostly flat with a modest elevation gain, and it's the route most residents already know without thinking about it.
What this actually tells you about the neighborhood
The headline version of this story is simple: Empire Ranch is finally getting its park. The more accurate version is that Empire Ranch got a guaranteed base park and a maybe on the parts that would have made it distinctive. That's not a criticism of the design or the council's decision. Building anything on a three-terrace, pond-centered slope next to a high school was never going to be cheap, and choosing the version that could actually be finished over the version that might stall again for another five years is a reasonable trade.
What it does mean is that the neighborhood's patience isn't quite over. The vote you read about in April was real progress. The fishing dock you saw in the December renderings is still theoretical. Knowing the difference is the difference between being pleasantly surprised in 2028 and being disappointed by a park that looks a little sparser than the one you were shown.
For residents weighing what their home is worth against everything happening in the neighborhood right now, from new parks to golf course access to the rest of the Empire Ranch corridor, The Friedrich Team tracks this kind of local detail because it's the kind of thing that actually affects daily life here, not just resale value. If you're curious what your Empire Ranch home is worth today, request a free home valuation and we'll walk you through it.
