Ask anyone who has lived on Cliffside Drive for more than a few years how you get from your backyard to the Salado Creek Greenway, and you'll get a shrug. The creek runs right along the city's eastern edge. The greenway trail runs right along the creek. And there is still no formal, city-sanctioned way to walk from one to the other without driving around to an entrance somewhere else in San Antonio.
That gap has been the subject of city council meetings, a $1.2 million grant application, a withdrawn grant application, a four-person subcommittee, an eight-person citizens panel, and a town hall with 62 people crammed into City Hall on a Wednesday night in March. What most residents seem to have missed in all that noise is the actual outcome: Shavano Park did not fail to reach an agreement on this trail. It reached one. A majority of residents who showed up in March picked a specific design. What nobody has done yet is build it, fund it on a calendar, or say when that changes.
The Trail That Got Killed First
The story most people know starts in 2025, when city officials pitched the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization on a $1.2 million project: a 10-foot-wide concrete trail running roughly 3,254 linear feet from Cliffside Drive to the greenway, paired with a 5-foot bike path connecting to Northwest Military Highway and a new trailhead near Saddletree Road. Mayor Bob Werner told the AAMPO the project wasn't just for Shavano Park's own residents, framing it as a piece of connectivity for the whole north-central San Antonio area. City Manager Bill Hill said the engineering was straightforward and that funding, not feasibility, was the only real obstacle.
Then residents found out what "10-foot concrete trail" meant in practice. Longtime resident Louise Chumley told the council she only discovered the plan online in June and that the design called for roughly 30,000 square feet of concrete along the green belt, the removal of multiple mature oak trees, and infrastructure pushed into front yards along Cliffside. Others raised the same set of concerns in the same meeting: loss of the area's rural quiet, parking overflow if a lot went in near Saddletree, disturbance to wildlife habitat along the creek. David Pierce, speaking for the citizens tree committee, said the plan would replace mature trees with concrete and pointed to a petition that had collected roughly 450 signatures.
The council listened. Council member Pete Conrad moved to withdraw the AAMPO grant application outright, saying the proposal had turned into something well outside what the council had intended. The motion passed. The $1.2 million version of this trail was dead within about two months of being proposed.
Four Neighbors Redesigned It From the Ground Up
What happened next is the part of the story that rarely makes it into hallway conversation. Instead of walking away from the idea entirely, the city council sent it back to the Planning and Zoning Commission with a narrower assignment: study only the entry point at Cliffside Drive, weigh the benefits against the downsides, and bring back options.
Alongside that referral, the council set aside $25,000 for preliminary engineering and survey work, drawn from the city's Community Enhancement and Engagement Fund rather than property tax revenue. That fund was expected to collect roughly $150,000 in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, enough to cover a 20 to 30 percent design concept for the entry point, the level of detail needed to actually compare options side by side rather than argue over a single rendering.
P&Z formed a four-member subcommittee to lead the work: Chairman Kyle Horlen from the Estates, and Commissioners Bill Thorpe from Cliffside Road itself, Zach Taylor from Bent Oak, and Terrin Enssle from Shavano Creek. Alongside them, the city built a Citizens Advisory Panel of eight residents, selected from 19 applicants, most of whom had indicated support for improving access.
That combination, people who lived closest to the proposed trail sitting alongside a commission tasked with weighing wildlife and neighborhood character, produced something the original $1.2 million pitch never had: three genuinely different design options, priced and scaled for a much smaller footprint than the version that got killed.
| Option | Width | Surface | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | 10 feet | Concrete | Full shared-use path, room for cyclists and walkers to pass |
| B | 6 feet | Concrete | Sidewalk-width, brush-and-rock-salt finish for wet traction |
| C | 6 feet | Loose gravel | Nature trail, lower maintenance cost, more informal feel |
All three versions included a fence and gate, with a stated preference for restricting access to Shavano Park residents only, a detail that quietly answers one of the loudest objections from the original fight: outside traffic and parking overflow.
The Vote Nobody Talks About
On March 18, 2026, the subcommittee and city staff presented all three options at a town hall inside City Hall. Sixty-two residents showed up in person. Forty-two of them filled out the online survey afterward, and a handful more left comment cards or spoke directly with staff.
The result: Option B, the 6-foot concrete trail, won with 54.76 percent support. Not a landslide, but a clear majority, and notably the middle option, cheaper and less intrusive than the 10-foot version that sparked the original backlash, but more durable and accessible than a gravel path.
This is the detail that reframes the whole saga. The trail fight, as most residents understand it, sounds like a standoff between people who want a trail and people who don't. The actual town hall data says something different: a majority of the people who bothered to show up and weigh in wanted some version of this trail. What they didn't want was the specific, oversized version the city tried to fund through a state grant without enough neighborhood input first. Shrink the design, add resident-only access, and the math on public opinion flips.
Council member Albert Aleman made a version of this point at an earlier council meeting, noting that recommendations for this exact connection have surfaced going back to a 2016-17 land swap, through town halls in 2018, and that the opposition and support split has looked roughly the same every time the city has asked. The debate wasn't new. What changed in 2026 was the size of what was actually on the table.
Where the Actual Bottleneck Sits Now
The subcommittee's final report and recommendation went to City Council at the April 27, 2026 meeting, the deadline set when this whole review process began. That meeting is where the winning option and the town hall numbers became part of the official record.
What didn't happen at that meeting, or since, is a construction budget. The $25,000 authorized back in October 2025 only ever covered the design concept stage. The Community Enhancement and Engagement Fund that paid for it is not a dedicated infrastructure account with a multi-year capital plan behind it. It's a smaller, quarter-by-quarter pool. The 2025 version of this project failed because the community rejected a specific design. The 2026 version of this project has a community-approved design and still lacks a construction budget, a contractor, or a start date.
As of now, the city's own project page for this effort states plainly that there is no timetable for Salado Creek trail access. Not "delayed." Not "pending a vote." No timetable, full stop. That single line is the most current, most accurate answer to the question every Cliffside Drive resident eventually asks a neighbor: so when does this actually happen. The honest answer, as of today, is that nobody has said.
What This Actually Means if You Live Near Cliffside Drive
If you're on Cliffside, Bent Oak, Shavano Creek, or anywhere else within walking distance of that stretch, here's the practical version of everything above. The design decision is effectively made. Option B, a 6-foot concrete path with resident-only gated access, is what the neighborhood chose and what staff will likely pursue whenever funding lines up. That means when construction does eventually get scheduled, it probably won't look like the 10-foot version that triggered the 2025 petition. Mature oak removal on the scale residents feared with the original AAMPO grant proposal was tied specifically to that larger design, not to the smaller option that actually won community support.
What hasn't happened yet is a construction budget, a contractor bid, or a date on a calendar. The city's preferred way to keep residents current is a text alert system, sending COSP EVENTS to 91896, which has been the most reliable way to catch each new development in this multi-year process before it shows up secondhand at an HOA meeting.
Shavano Park's small size, roughly 3,300 residents across 1,263 homes packed into 1.77 square miles, means a story like this one moves through the neighborhood slowly and often incompletely. The trail isn't dead. It isn't built. It's sitting exactly where a majority of residents left it in March: designed, priced, and waiting on a city that has said, in its own words, that it doesn't yet know when.
If you're weighing a move into Shavano Park, out of it, or just want a clearer read on how decisions like this one tend to play out here, Trinie Ortiz Johnson has been tracking Shavano Park's estate living and privacy patterns and its acreage and outdoor living market closely. Request a Confidential Consultation to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what's on a portal listing.
