The Perry City Council weighed its options Monday night before buying into a public-art design for the Raccoon River Valley Trail (RRVT) trailhead in Perry supplied by RDG Planning and Design Dahlquist Art Studio and based on the art of the Waukee trailhead.
The trail-wide art motifs are intended to create a “common theme” and a “cultural corridor” for the 89-mile RRVT, with elements of the Waukee design repeated in many of the trail’s 13 towns.
The council was presented with three options in a memo from Perry City Administrator Sven Peterson and a preliminary concept proposal from RDG. Peterson’s memo indicated the prices of the art works as well as the amount of money left to be raised by the city in order to pay for them. Peterson’s figures are reproduced below:
Option One: One lighted, double-column erection at the Trailhead in Caboose Park.
Funding Source Amount
Iowa Great Places $17,674.00
Minburn IGP $2,926.00
Perry Rotary $1,000.00
Waukee Rotary $5,000.00
Bock Foundation $2,500.00
100+ People for Perry $1,500.00
Total Funds in Hand $30,600.00
Project Cost $41,200.00
Remaining $(10,600.00)
Option Two: One lighted, single-column erection at the Trailhead in Caboose Park.
Funding Source Amount
Iowa Great Places $10,000.00
Perry Rotary $1,000.00
Waukee Rotary $5,000.00
Bock Foundation $2,500.00
100+ People for Perry $1,500.00
Total Funds in Hand $20,000.00
Project Cost $22,145.00
Remaining $(2,145.00)
Option Three: One lighted, single-column erection at the Trailhead in Caboose Park plus one unlighted, single-column erection along the trail near Iowa Highway 141.
Funding Source Amount
Iowa Great Places $20,600.00
Perry Rotary $1,000.00
Waukee Rotary $5,000.00
Bock Foundation $2,500.00
100+ People for Perry $1,500.00
Total Funds in Hand $30,600.00
Single Lit $22,145.00
Single Un-lit $20,085.00
Total $42,230.00
Remaining $(11,630.00)
Peterson read an email from Perry City Council member Bark Wolling, who was absent from the meeting, in which Wolling cast her vote for the third option, the two single-column installations, one at the downtown trailhead and one on the south side of Perry.
“Will you be able to see that from Highway 141?” Council member Dean Berkland said. “I think that would be very nice. So much traffic goes by there that I think it would be kind of a neat thing to show people if we do go with that third option. Myself I think we’re getting more for the money with option number three.”
Jim Miller, a strong supporter of the Waukee Trailhead artwork and a member of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association, urged to council to participate in the trail-wide project.
“Right from the beginning,” Miller said, “the idea was that whatever’s done in Waukee should be a design that’s portable to the other communities with the thought that it’s a trail project and not just a Waukee project.”
The Waukee trailhead project, called “In the Shadow of the Rails,” has been described in the inimitable words of RRVTA founder Chuck Offenberger as an artwork that “would stretch more than 350 feet long and have 34 colorful lighted-at-night columns that stand 16 feet high. Those columns would be topped by steel beams stretching across the trail. And on top of those steel beams would be parallel steel rails, weaving serpentine-like, looking like they might carry a train. There would be 23 other lighted columns, as tall as an adult, that would line the other two sides of the triangular trailhead. An adjacent steel shade structure would include solar panels that could provide the power for the LED lighting. Total cost for the Waukee installation — about $1.01 million.”
Miller said the cost for the Waukee trailhead now stands at about $1.1 million, which includes $220,000 for the parking lot. Miller emphasized the scale and uniqueness of the plan to reproduce the Waukee themes throughout the RRVT.
“As far as we know — I’ve made this claim, and no one’s be able to prove me wrong — but I don’t know that there’s anywhere else in the world that this has been done on this scale,” he said. “So to have a recurring art theme over an 89-mile trail, nobody else has ever done that.”
Miller noted that RRVT supporters in Greene County have committed to installations at Cooper, Winkleman Switch and the Jefferson Depot, and the Dallas Center City Council is poised to approve four of the columns with the overhead rails, “so it is becoming a trail-wide project,” he said. “I’m very much look forward to working with Perry on this.”
Berkland asked whether the Waukee themes would also be reproduced on the portion of the High Trestle Trail that will eventually stretch from Woodward to Perry and will make Perry unique in serving as a double trailhead for the two popular bike trails.
“I may be speaking out of turn,” Miller said, “but I know there was some discussion at one time of having the cribbing from the Trestle at the intersection of the two trails, so where people get off the Raccoon and go to the High Trestle in Perry, they would have cribbing pointing them toward the Trestle, which I think would be really cool.”
The Perry City Council agreed about the coolness and voted unanimously to approve raising the $11,630 needed to pay for Option Three and to authorize Peterson “to enter into a contract for construction.”
