Since starting to work with an engineering firm on repaving the final portion of the Raccoon River Valley Trail, another phase will begin soon with the Greene County Conservation Board.

Director Tanner Scheuermann says the 14 miles between Greene and Guthrie County that needs to be repaved is still in the fundraising stage. He tells Raccoon Valley Radio that WHKS Engineering has estimated the project to be $4.5 million, of which about $2.5 million has been raised through primarily grants, including Grow Greene County Gaming Corporation pledging  $500,000 over four years and a Land and Water Conservation Fund Grant of $250,000 that Guthrie County Conservation applied for, among other funds.  

Scheuermann points out the next phase will be through private donations and business, as the Conservation Board works with its non-profit groups to get that started.

“Really kick off and do some fundraising there, as well. Talking with some of the organizations here locally about potentially sponsoring a quarter mile or something on the trail too. Our team at WHKS Engineering been helping us with grant writing, of course, the engineering and stuff like that. And then, putting together kind of these pieces that we need to go out and talk to businesses and say, ‘Hey, would you be interested in sponsoring part of this project?’”    

Scheuermann notes that after doing a lot of consulting work with the engineering firm and individuals who are in the construction industry, the best option still remains to be concrete instead of an asphalt overlay. He states that had there been a bigger maintenance budget to rehab the asphalt portion of the trail, doing another overlay would’ve been feasible. 

Additionally, with the project taking over two years so far to fundraise, Scheuermann addresses comments about doing a few miles of concrete over several years.

“If we phase into more than one project, then you’re paying for staging equipment to what, two, three, multiple times. And again, you see a lot of that with people with bigger budgets to where they’re able to say, ‘Well yeah, we can put $2 million this year, we can put $2 million next year.’ Again, with looking at it, with the due diligence and the time that we put into planning for this, we thought that doing it in one shot would probably be the best way to go. When we go and apply for these grants, if we want back and told them, ‘Well, now we want to put it in two projects,’ they may take that funding away and we don’t want to do that.”      

Scheuermann is excited for the private donation portion to start soon and is hoping to get the rest of the funding needed for the project completed so more people can utilize that stretch of the trail and head to Jefferson, which is a spoke off of the main loop of the bike trail.