The Dallas County Conservation Board will hold the last of its public hearings tonight at 7 p.m. on the proposed route for a connector trail linking the Raccoon River Valley Trail in Perry and the High Trestle Trail in Woodward.
The hearing will follow the board’s regular 6 p.m. monthly meeting at Forest Park Museum near Perry at 14581 K Ave.
The connector trail project gained momentum last month when the Dallas County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate $400,000 to the project fund in their fiscal year 2016-2017 budget. The funds will become available to the conservation board July 1.
Mark Hanson, chair of the Dallas County Board of Supervisors, said the conservation board’s five-year budget called for seeking $100,000 each year for four years for the connector-trail project, but the supervisors decided to give them all the funding at once.
“We wanted to assure the conservation board that we were committed,” Hanson said, “and that we were going to commit that kind of money and that it was a one-time deal. We thought it was better to do it once and get it started.”
New arrangements among the county’s facilities — in particular the opening of the Human Services Campus — freed up funds to put toward the connector project that might otherwise have been spent acquiring property in Adel, so the board decided to fund the trail connection “all in one fell swoop,” Hanson said.
“From my own personal standpoint,” he said, “that connection would be a piece of infrastructure that will be very helpful for Woodward and for Perry. It’s a beginning. It should be done and needs to be done, and we’re willing to put some money up to make it happen. There might be a lot of people in the county who are angry about it and say, ‘Why the heck are you giving money for a bike trail that I’ll never use?’ but when the High Trestle Trail was built and the north loop of the Raccoon River Valley Trail, you could see the benefit of that connection, which is going to be a multi-million-dollar job. The county is not going to fund the whole thing, but we can be a partner, and we can put up a corpus.”
Mike Wallace, executive director of the Dallas County Conservation Board, said the supervisors’ funding allocation will strengthen the conservation board’s hand in seeking further federal and state recreational trail grants and in attracting private donations.
Wallace and the board of directors, including Chairperson Mark Powell, Vice Chairperson Nancy DeLong, Secretary and Treasurer Glenn Vondra and members Lorinda Inman and Jim Miller, are expected to review the current state of the connector trail at tonight’s public hearing. Rich Voelker of Snyder and Associates, the department’s engineering consultant, will also attend.
