COOPER, Iowa, January 8, 2008 – This day proved to be a “Super Tuesday” for the Raccoon River Valley Trail, with four major funding advances happening or being announced on this same day, all of them pointing toward major expansion over the next two to three years of the trail itself and amenities along it.

In Ames, the Iowa Transportation Commission announced a $750,000 grant to the RRVT of federal “transportation enhancement” money it administers, to help development of a new 33-mile “North Loop” on the RRVT. The route of it will go from Herndon on the current trail, east through Jamaica, Dawson and Perry, then going southeast through Minburn and Dallas Center before reconnecting to the current trail on the northwest corner of Waukee. Last year, the commission committed $780,830 to that same project, and with Tuesday’s new grant, it means construction of the new trail will almost certainly begin during 2008. When the new “North Loop” is eventually completed, it will mean the RRVT will have grown from its current 56 miles to a total of 89 miles, making it one of the longest recreational trails in the U.S.

In addition, the commission awarded a federal grant of $336,531 to the City of Minburn “to restore the town’s railroad depot to its original 1914 appearance,” according to Des Moines Register reporter Bill Petroski’s story on the newspaper’s Internet site. “The depot will be relocated and will be used as a city council chamber, library, post office, and as a rest stop and museum by trail users” on the new loop of the RRVT. Earlier, the Dallas County Conservation Board received about $250,000 to do a restoration and renovation of the old railroad depot in Dawson, and that work is underway now.

LOCAL MATCHES.  Meanwhile, in Guthrie Center Tuesday morning, the Guthrie County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to commit $100,000 over the next three years in support of a project to resurface 5.5 miles of the RRVT from Panora to Yale. That will complete the replacement of the last of the original asphalt surface of the RRVT, which dated to 1989 and was badly deteriorated. Another five miles of the original surface, from Panora south to near Linden, was replaced with new concrete last summer, and it is now one of the nicest stretches of trail in the state. The Guthrie County supervisors invested $100,000 in that earlier project, too. Their willingness to contribute has been a signal about the recognition of trail development and maintenance as important tools for local economic development and tourism growth.

And in Jefferson Tuesday evening, the Jefferson City Council voted 4-1 to commit up to $32,500 of in-kind water and sewer work for a new RV and tent campground to be built at the trailhead in that city, between the restored Jefferson Depot and the Greene County Fairgrounds. The campground is being planned for trail users as well as those attending the county fair or other events on the fairgrounds. The city government’s commitment to the project was the last major amount of local funding being sought for the campground project, which is expected to have a total cost of $133,000. Other major local contributors are the Greene County Fair Board, at $50,000, and the Greene County Conservation Board, at $10,000.

There was also good news impacting the RRVT at Monday night’s meeting of the Des Moines City Council, which ordered construction of the last segment of trail yet to be completed along Walnut Creek, south and west of the Des Moines Art Center. When that small stretch of new trail is completed this spring and connected to existing trails in the city, it will mean you can get on a bicycle in Jefferson and ride on paved trails all the way to the Principal Park baseball stadium in downtown Des Moines, a distance of about 70 miles. “Construction bids will be received January 16, and the contract will be awarded in February,” said Richard Brown, trails coordinator for the City of Des Moines. “This should leave us with plenty of riding time this summer on the trail. It might be ride-able by ‘Bike to Work Week’ in May, but I think that will be pushing it.”

Chuck Offenburger, secretary of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association headquartered in the small trail town of Cooper, said “for our RRVT communities and trail users, these generous grants are all very important steps toward our goal of making this trail one of the very best in America. We think the RRVT will become a recreation destination with national appeal.”

TWO MAJOR INITIATIVES.  Offenburger explained there are two other major initiatives helping to enhance the trail, one of them having just happened and the other in process now.

Nearly two years of negotiations with the Union Pacific Railroad for the purchase of the abandoned right-of-way from Dawson to Waukee were completed right before Christmas, with the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation paying $960,000 for the 28-mile-long ribbon of land.  The INHF in turn will sell that land to the Dallas County Conservation Board for development as a trail. Leading the negotiating for the INHF was Lisa Hein, the foundation’s program and planning director who is a real veteran of trail development projects across the state.

“When you’re negotiating with a railroad for the acquistion of land like this, it’s a very long, tedious process,” said Offenburger. “Lisa Hein has special tenacity and patience that make her one of the best at this kind of negotiating. All of us who enjoy using the RRVT should be grateful to both Lisa and the Natural Heritage Foundation for the leading role they played in acquiring the right-of-way.”

Meanwhile, Mike Wallace, the Dallas County Conservation Board’s executive director has been hard at work on a long, tedious project, too — preparing an application that will ask for a multi-million dollar grant from the Community Attraction & Tourism (CAT) fund of the state government’s Vision Iowa Program. That program has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to help build projects as big as the new Wells Fargo Arena in downtown Des Moines and the fantastic riverfront developments in Dubuque, and projects as small as playgrounds, waterparks and small community centers. The funds used in the Vision Iowa and CAT awards are from the state government’s share of gambling receipts in Iowa. They always require that local matching money be raised as a pre-condition to receiving CAT money.

HUGE REGIONAL PROJECT.  The CAT grant application Wallace is preparing will ask for funding, to go along with the money already raised, to build the full new 33-mile “North Loop” of the trail. It will also help pay for the resurfacing of the existing trail between Panora and Yale, as well as help complete such projects as the depot renovations in Minburn and Dawson, the trailhead campground in Jefferson and many other relatively small projects in the 14 towns and three counties that the RRVT traverses.

Wallace has been working closely on the grant application with Joe Hanner and Dan Towers, who are the Conservation Board directors in Guthrie and Greene Counties. The three Conservation Boards are the owners and operators of the existing RRVT.  Wallace, Hanner and Towers also serve on the board of directors of the RRVT Association, and other association board members have been involved in the CAT application, too. The conservation directors and the other board members have all been soliciting ideas for local projects along the trail, plus letters of support and financial commitments from city and county governments, many service clubs and also the county community foundations. That local support has become relatively easy to find, since community leaders have begun to see the positive economic impact that trail enhancements bring. For example, the trail’s potential has been the key reason that three new bicycle shops have opened along it, two old hotels that had fallen into disrepair are being renovated as small inns, a restaurant in Adel relocated to a trailside location and about a dozen other business developments are in the works. 

So as Hanner started seeking financial commitments in Guthrie County to match the state grants, he has been been successful in getting substantial pledges, like $45,000 from his own conservation board, $10,000 from the City of Panora, $5,000 from the Panora economic development group, $2,500 from the City of Yale and $500 from the very small City of Jamaica. And in Greene County, Towers has helped secure such pledges as $7,000 from the Jefferson Rotary Club and $2,000 from the local Kiwanis Club.

Wallace has said that when the costs are totaled for the purchase of the right-of-way from the Union Pacific Railroad, for all the new trail construction on the “North Loop,” for the resurfacing of the five-mile stretch of the existing RRVT and for all the related projects now being developed along the trail, the figure tops $13 million. 

If the CAT grant application, which Wallace intends to file this month, is eventually approved by the Vision Iowa Board, the grant would help cover those total costs, when pooled with all the financial commitments that were announced on Tuesday and money that was raised earlier and has been held in reserve.

LIKE MINNESOTA’S ROOT RIVER TRAIL.  In the Des Moines Register’s story about the Iowa Transportation Commission’s grant of $750,000, reporter Petroski quoted Mark Wyatt, executive director of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition, saying, “This is fantastic. It will be a great opportunity for biking, walking and recreation.”  Wyatt, who lives in North Liberty in eastern Iowa, “predicted the expanded trail has the potential to become a regional tourist attraction, competing with the popular Root River Trail in southeastern Minnesota,” the Register reported.

Wallace was quoted in the newspaper saying that the RRVT extension will provide central Iowa with a route unlike any other statewide.

“Starting in Waukee, you will be able to go through Adel, Redfield, up through Linden and Panora and Yale, and hook on again at Herndon and come back down through Dawson, Perry and down to Waukee again,” Wallace said. “There are other loops in Iowa created by hooking one trail to another, but this will be the only continuous trail of this magnitude.”

The loop he described there will be a total of 72 miles.

Offenburger, the RRVT Association secretary, said when that loop is completed, “we will begin seeing individuals, families and other groups of cyclists and trail users coming to the RRVT and spending several days on our trail. They’ll be looking for fun places to stay overnight, neat restaurants and bars, ice cream shops, local museums, theaters, live music venues and all the rest.  With all this funding coming available now, the challenge for all of us is to help get all those amenities developed.  There will be a lot of investment made by people wanting to go into business in our trail communities, and I think we’ll also see a boom in home construction along the trail, too.”

Article Published: 01-08-2008