Suffolk lands $100M award to build Cottonwood Canyons Transit Center

Cottonwood Heights · November 10, 2026

Suffolk says it has won a $100 million award to build the Cottonwood Canyons Transit Center, the parking and bus hub at the heart of UDOT's plan to ease winter gridlock in Big and Little Cottonwood canyons. The national builder announced the award Tuesday in a Business Wire release headlined "Suffolk Builds on Utah Momentum With $100 Million Cottonwood Canyons Transit Center Award."

The project is a mobility hub at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. According to the State of Utah Division of Facilities Construction and Management's request for proposals, posted in May (solicitation MP26047), the hub will include a 1,750-car parking garage, 75 employee parking stalls, bus parking, a bus transit center, and other facilities to support bus operations. DFCM sought a construction manager/general contractor (CM/GC) for the job, set a fixed contract price limit of $99.5 million, and said VCBO Architecture and its team had already been selected for design.

The structure is planned for a large, undeveloped gravel pit on Wasatch Boulevard near the canyon entrance. UDOT's Cottonwood Canyons program manager, Devin Weder, told KUER in June that the garage will be "roughly 70 feet tall, so that's four to five stories."

"We'll be breaking ground, ideally next spring, so spring of 2027 and the fall of 2028 for starting operations," Weder told KUER. UDOT's Cottonwood Canyons Transit program page lists final design and permitting in spring 2027, right-of-way acquisition and the start of construction in summer 2027, and anticipated completion of the transit center, road improvements, and resort bus stations in fall 2028, with the schedule subject to change.

The transit center is the anchor of phase one of UDOT's canyon strategy. The program page says the funded work also includes a new grade-separated "Gravel Pit Interchange" on Wasatch Boulevard, an expanded bus fleet, enclosed resort bus stations, bus-priority road improvements, and variable-priced tolling.

When UDOT issued its Big Cottonwood Canyon decision in May, the agency said buses would leave the new hub every 10 to 15 minutes at first, with service increasing to every seven minutes to each resort by 2050, ABC4 and TownLift reported. The Big Cottonwood improvements were estimated at about $264.5 million, with $114 million already programmed through the Little Cottonwood Canyon plan for the gravel pit mobility hub and the Wasatch Boulevard interchange.

"We've all experienced winter traffic backing up in Big Cottonwood Canyon," Weder said at the time. "These improvements are designed to give people another reliable option to reach the canyon without sitting in hours of traffic."

For the first time, UDOT will run its own bus service in the canyons, buying its own buses and taking over from the Utah Transit Authority, KUER reported. Later phases, including widening Wasatch Boulevard, snow sheds on SR-210, and the Little Cottonwood gondola, remain unfunded.

Suffolk runs a Mountain West office in Lehi led by Chief Operating Officer John Kemp, according to the company's Salt Lake City page. In August, Suffolk and Zwick Construction were selected to build Dixie Technical College's 91,700-square-foot Trades and Technology Building in St. George.

Sources: Suffolk via Business Wire; Utah DFCM solicitation MP26047; UDOT; KUER; ABC4; TownLift. Header image is an illustration, not a rendering of the actual project.