For as long as most current residents can remember, the stretch of levee between Glenn Hall Park and the H Street Bridge has run on an honor system. Nobody clocked your speed. Nobody cleared out the dirt jumps kids and teenagers carved into the brush along the water. The paved trail simply stopped where a footpath took over, and everyone who used it, walkers, anglers, the after-work bike crowd, understood the gaps as part of the deal. That arrangement is ending, and it is ending on three fronts at once, in the same twelve months.
River Park sits on the river-bend edge of East Sacramento, its streets winding down to a levee that has always functioned as the neighborhood's unofficial backyard. This year, that backyard is picking up an engineer, an ordinance, and a patrol with new equipment, all within the same short walk.
Three Projects, One Levee, Same Year
None of what follows is a single agency acting on its own. The city is physically rebuilding the trail surface. Sacramento County just rewrote what's legal to ride on it. The Army Corps of Engineers already reshaped the riverbank the trail sits on. Treated separately, these read as three unrelated news items. Walked in sequence, from Glenn Hall Park to the H Street Bridge, they are the same year happening to the same quarter mile of ground.
The Trail Finally Gets an Engineer
The Two Rivers Trail Phase 2 project is converting the informal gravel-and-dirt path between Sutter's Landing Park and the H Street Bridge into an engineered, 8-foot paved trail with compacted shoulders, built to bear the weight of maintenance and emergency vehicles. The city put the project at 2.4 miles and $7 million when the contract went to Martin Brothers Construction, approved by City Council in December 2023, with construction beginning in March 2024 after what project manager Adam Randolph described as more than a decade of staff coordination. The goal, as he put it, was simple:
"It's creating connectivity for multiple trails in our trail network."
The original target was to finish paving by the end of 2024. That deadline came and went. Months later, a trail reviewer checking conditions in August 2025 still described the mile-long stretch under the interstate and railroad bridges as impassable for cyclists. A full year has passed since that review, and the city has not published an updated completion date. Worth confirming directly with the city's Two Rivers Trail Phase II page before you plan a ride around it.
The Same Work That Thinned the Canopy Also Delayed the Trail
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only read one article about the trail or one complaint thread about the missing trees. The city has been explicit that final paving on Two Rivers Trail Phase 2 depends on the completion of three separate, coordinated projects, one of them being the Army Corps of Engineers' River Bank Protection Project. That is the same Army Corps levee-armoring effort that, in 2024, removed a significant number of trees along the riverbank near River Park, a move Wikipedia's neighborhood entry notes drew real controversy at the time.
In other words, the bare-looking stretch of bank people have been grumbling about since 2024 and the trail that still isn't finished are not two separate grievances. They're the same levee-safety mandate, moving through the same short section of riverbank on two different timelines. The canopy thinned first because the armoring had to happen before the paving could.
Rangers Can Now Follow You Off the Pavement
On May 12, 2026, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors adopted ordinance changes aimed at high-speed modified e-bikes and e-motos on the Parkway, addressing vandalism and unauthorized trail-cutting. The rules took effect June 12, 2026. In practice, they draw a hard line that didn't exist before:
- Class 1 and Class 2 e-bikes remain permitted, provided riders stay within the Parkway's 15 mph speed limit
- Class 3 e-bikes and e-motos, capable of 28 mph or more, are now prohibited outright
- Building unauthorized jumps or courses in protected riverbank areas is a citable violation, not just a maintenance headache
Regional Parks ranger George Tzikas has seen the shift firsthand near River Bend Park, where riders have carved informal courses off the main trail:
"Our maintenance crews are out there all the time fixing what they make."
Rangers are now using utility terrain vehicles to reach areas along the bank that a truck or SUV never could, according to reporting from a PBS KVIE community reporter. That's a real change in what enforcement on this specific levee looks like. A year ago, a ranger in a marked SUV pacing your speed was the extent of it. Now there's a vehicle built to follow you into the brush.
Fifteen Years of Volunteers Turning Into Something Bigger
The American River Bike Patrol tells a version of the same story, just slower and friendlier. It started in 2020 as a volunteer trail-safety partnership with Sacramento County Parks, trained by the National Ski Patrol in first aid, CPR, and basic bike repair. By 2022, it had been authorized to patrol El Dorado County's trail from Folsom to Camino. In 2023, the City of Roseville brought it on for all of its bike trails. In 2024, the State of California authorized it inside Folsom Lake and Auburn State Recreation Areas, and Folsom added the Johnny Cash Trail to its territory. The patrol's own service map now covers more than 354 miles across four separate jurisdictions, and it has been recognized twice by the National Ski Patrol as the finest in the nation.
What began as a single-county volunteer arrangement is, four years later, a multi-jurisdiction patrol authority. The levee behind Glenn Hall Park was part of its original territory in 2020. It's easy to miss how much that original arrangement has grown around it since.
What's Still Running on Neighbors, Not Ordinances
None of this has touched everything. Paradise Beach, the shallow cove near Sacramento State where the river bends, has drawn crowds without much formal oversight for a century. On one especially busy day in 1929, the Sacramento Bee counted 9,364 visitors to the beach. It picked up a very different reputation decades later, when the paper called it "Sacramento's No. 1 nude sunbathing beach" in 1974, a run that ended the following year when the city council banned public nudity on its beaches. Today it's simply where people swim, launch kayaks, and let dogs off leash near the water. Sacramento County posts basic safety reminders. There's no lifeguard, no ranger station, and swimming remains at your own risk.
Glenn Hall Park's Pops in the Park concert series is still a community-organized affair, neighbors bringing folding chairs to hear local bands under the trees. The River Park Neighborhood Association still runs the Fourth of July parade of classic cars and decorated wagons that ends at Glenn Hall Park with food trucks and live music, the same kind of gathering that's been happening long enough that the association's Garden Club, founded in 1951, is still doing tree plantings around the neighborhood entrance and nearby school grounds decades later.
That's the actual shape of this year on the River Park levee. The trail is being engineered. The riding rules are being enforced with new equipment. The patrol that started as a favor to the county is now a regional operation. And the part of the neighborhood that still runs entirely on volunteers, the concerts, the parade, the tree plantings, hasn't needed a single ordinance to keep going. Both things are true on the same half mile of riverbank, in the same year, for anyone who walks it regularly enough to notice.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home near the levee, or just want a neighbor's read on how River Park and the rest of East Sacramento are holding up this year, Pierre Daniel Viard is always glad to talk through it. Reach out to request a neighborhood consultation.
