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| 5/13/2003 11:05:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Proposed bike trail 'a done deal'
By John R. Stone
“Glenwood to Starbuck is a go.” With those surprising words, Pope County Highway Engineer, Brian Noetzelman, described the current status of a bike trail and route which would go between Glenwood and Starbuck and then around Lake Minnewaska. And he tossed in a few surprises about a path from Glenwood to Villard as well. The original bike grant of $400,000 required an $80,000 local match. Restructuring the project, and combining it with the county takeover and paving of 260th Avenue, reduces the local match to $21,955.77. And with $26,725 already in the bank Noetzelman said it was, indeed, a “done deal.” Noetzelman explained that before people got too excited, a local match would be needed for the Glenwood-Villard route. He said that preliminary approval has been received for a grant of $435,000 for paving of the old Burlington Northern Railroad bed between Glenwood and the Villard beach. The county purchased that bed from the railroad in 2001. But that grant requires a local match of $87,000, so he said a local fundraising effort needed to continue. The money would be needed by the spring of 2005. He said that the higher cost of the Villard route is that it will be entirely on railroad bed and will not be able to be combined with a highway project. “I know some people have commented they would have liked to use the original proposal for a bike path from Glenwood to Starbuck along the rail bed,” said Noetzelman. “The numbers no longer work.” Noetzelman explained that the original $400,000 grant included money for a 50-foot bridge over Trapper’s Run along the railroad bed. “The trouble was, the span is 120 feet,” said Noetzelman. That meant, he said, that the total project would have cost $531,641 and that the local match required would have been $214,783. “We were able to coordinate the bike trail with the work on 260th Avenue,” said Nortzelman of the change in cost for the Glenwood-Starbuck segment. The joint effort means that some of what Minnewaska Township and Minnewaska Area Schools are paying toward the 260th Avenue project counts toward the local match for the bike trail grant. “The entrance to the school is what changed all of this,” he said. The new route will go from where Minnesota Avenue and Highways 28-29 meet near Food and Fuel out Lakshore Drive (County Highway 54) to the Golf Course Road in Long Beach then back north to Highway 28-29. A new path will be built in the Highway28-29 ditch from Golf Course Road to County Highway 24 and traffic will cross Highway 28-29 at that point. The route will continue along CSAH 24 until it reaches 260th Avenue (CSAH 31). Then it will head south to Minnewaska township road and west briefly to the railroad bed. The route to Starbuck will continue along the railroad bed, which will be paved. It will cross Highway 28-29 again at North Lakeshore Drive in Starbuck and follow that route into town. North Lakeshore will be paved all the way into Starbuck as part of a Starbuck project scheduled for this summer. The rest of the route around Lake Minnewaska will include the existing Starbuck bike path south to CSAH 18, then east to CSAH 17 and back around the lake into Glenwood. Both CSAH 18 and 24, and the newly constructed CSAH 31 will all have wide shoulders specificially designed to allow for safe bike travel. A special leg of the trail has been added near Minnewaska Area High School. Just south of where the trail links with the old rail bed, MAHS is adding a rear entrance. The bike trail will head to the school, allowing students to ride to school from either Glenwood or Starbuck without using Highway 28-29. Noetzelman said that the final approval of the new plan was received May 2. At the May 6 county board meeting the county approved calling for bids for the bike trail construction with a bid letting set for August and grading this fall. Bituminous surfacing will take place in the spring of 2004 for 260th Avenue, the bike path and related projects. He said all of the work would be part of a single contract. The timetable for the Villard segment would be to let bids the summer of 2005 with final work to be done in 2006. He added that a 1.1 mile segment of CSAH 17 from CSAH 18 toward the lake would be started in 2006 and completed in 2007 and would include a wide shoulder for a bike lane. There is no work scheduled on the balance of CSAH 17 from that point into Glenwood. “What you may end up with is more of a bike route that a bike trail,” said Noetzelman.
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