Wrightstown Opened Its Streets to UTVs. It Never Opened the Trail.

On the afternoon of October 3, 2025, kids at Wrightstown Elementary climbed into the passenger seats of side-by-sides instead of minivans. It was the first day the village's new ordinance let ATVs, UTVs, and golf carts onto local streets, and at least a few parents decided the school pickup line was the place to test it out. A rider named Craig Fredlich told a Green Bay television crew that afternoon that the change should have come sooner, adding that it made the countryside nicer to see at a slower pace.

Almost a year later, the ordinance is still in its first full cycle, and the second riding season is about to start again around that same October date. Most residents already know the basics by now. What's easy to miss, a year in, is that the rule only ever touched half of Wrightstown's outdoor life. The streets opened. The trail through town never did, and this fall that gap is showing up in a different way than anyone expected when the ordinance passed.

What actually changed, and what didn't

The Village Board approved the ordinance in August 2025, and it took effect that October after the village put up the signage needed to mark which routes were fair game. The rules, confirmed by both the village's own summary and on-the-record comments from Village Administrator Travis Coenen, are specific enough to matter:

• Golf carts are barred from any state or county road, and from any local road with a speed limit over 25 mph.
• ATVs and UTVs are allowed only on roads posted at 35 mph or under.
• All three vehicle types are limited to operating hours of 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
• Operators must be at least 16, and vehicles need valid registration and insurance, the same as any other vehicle on the road.
• None of the three are allowed on sidewalks, trails, or in parks, under any circumstance.

That last line is where the story actually lives. The village's own language around the ordinance treats it less like a settled right and more like something residents have to keep earning:

Please read and abide by the rules to ensure safe travels and a rich future for this privilege.

Coenen used similar framing when the ordinance launched, describing the goal as a successful and safe entry for the community rather than a done deal. A year later, that word choice still matters, because Wrightstown is in the middle of two other planning efforts right now. The village is finishing public engagement on a 2045 Comprehensive Plan and separately rewriting its zoning code to replace older rules with something more current. None of that is formally tied to the UTV ordinance in anything the village has published, but it does mean the same village government asking residents to protect this privilege is, in the same season, rewriting the rulebook around it. This isn't a rule that got passed and forgotten. It sits inside an active, ongoing conversation about what Wrightstown allows on its own ground.

The map has two systems, and they don't touch

Drive through Wrightstown and you're working with one set of rules. Walk, bike, or paddle through it and you're working with an entirely different one, and the ordinance was written to keep those two systems from ever overlapping.

The Fox River State Trail runs directly through the village on its way from downtown Green Bay south toward Calumet County, connecting Wrightstown to Allouez, De Pere, and Holland along a former rail corridor. Inside the village, the locally maintained Wrightstown Heritage Trail winds along the river as well, and Mueller Park sits right on the water with its own walking paths and boat launch. All of it, the state trail, the Heritage Trail, and the park paths, is explicitly off-limits to the vehicles the new ordinance covers. A UTV can legally drive down a posted village street to get near the river. It cannot turn onto the trail itself, and it cannot use the park paths to shortcut between neighborhoods.

That separation shows up in small, practical ways once you actually live with it. The River Coffee & Cream, the cafe on High Court that sits right along the Fox River in a converted historic building, works as a meeting point for both sides of that divide. It was the packet pickup location this spring for the Fox River Challenge, a duathlon that used the eastern shoreline for its run leg and the village streets for the bike portion. Runners and cyclists arrived at the cafe on foot or by bike. A UTV rider could park nearby, but the actual river corridor stays a car-free, motor-free stretch by design, and that was true before the ordinance and remains true after it.

For anyone new to the new privilege, or anyone who assumed a wider street ordinance meant a wider set of allowed surfaces in general, that boundary is worth keeping straight. The two networks were built to serve different kinds of movement through the village, and the ordinance didn't blur that line. It sharpened it.

The trail is the one under construction this fall

Here's the part that's actually new this month, and it flips the inconvenience from one side of that divide to the other. A year ago, it was UTV and golf cart owners waiting on the village to finish putting up route signage before they could legally use the streets. This September, it's trail users who are dealing with the disruption. Brown County Parks has confirmed that the original paving contractor is returning to the Fox River State Trail this month to fix sections of pavement that have cracked since the recent resurfacing work, and that closures will follow while the repairs happen.

The county hasn't specified exactly which stretches will close or for how long, only that work is starting in September and that trail users should expect it. For anyone in Wrightstown who walks the Heritage Trail or bikes the state trail section toward Greenleaf on a regular schedule, that's worth building into plans for the next few weeks, especially heading into the kind of clear fall afternoons that usually bring more foot and bike traffic to that stretch of riverfront.

It's a small irony worth sitting with. The vehicle side of Wrightstown's outdoor life is heading into its second full season with the rules mostly settled and familiar. The pedestrian side is the one facing an unpredictable few weeks of construction. Both are true at the same time, on the same river, a few hundred feet apart.

What this actually means heading into October

None of this is a warning that the ordinance is in danger, and nothing in the record suggests the village is reconsidering it. But the language the village chose, calling this a privilege rather than a right, paired with the fact that the village is simultaneously rewriting its zoning code and long-range plan, is a reasonable signal that this fall's second season isn't just a formality. It's the stretch where residents either keep reinforcing that the streets and the trail stay separate, or they don't.

For the households who've made a UTV or golf cart part of how they get around the village, that means holding the line on where those vehicles go, especially near the river, where the temptation to cut across a park path is probably strongest. For everyone else, it means the next few weeks are a good time to double check trail conditions before a walk or a ride, since the closures moving through the Fox River State Trail this month aren't going to announce themselves with the same fanfare the street ordinance got a year ago.

Wrightstown didn't open everything up last October. It opened one system and left the other exactly as it was, on purpose. A year in, that distinction is holding, and this fall is a fair test of whether it keeps holding once the new zoning rules and the long-range plan start taking shape around it.

If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like Wrightstown actually offers beyond the headlines, from its riverfront pace of life to how its village government makes decisions, Batterman Integrity Group spends its time in exactly these kinds of details. Schedule a free consultation and home valuation with our team to talk through what living in Wrightstown, or anywhere in the Fox Cities, actually looks like day to day.