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Date: 6/15/2021
NORTHAMPTON – The Office of Planning and Sustainability is seeking input on how to best put a federal grant to use to enhance the city’s trails.
As part of its Northampton One initiative, the city received a $50,000 MassTrails Grant in November 2020 for the purpose of improving existing trails and conservation areas and recently hosted a public forum to gauge interest in various projects.
Director of Planning and Sustainability Wayne Feiden told Reminder Publishing one of the main focuses of the forum was to determine what the public saw as priorities. “We can do a couple big ticket items or you can do a lot of little things,” he said.
Among the “little things” discussed was the replacement of wood water borders on the trails with long-lasting steel ones. “Water borders made of wood, for example, last 10 years; water borders made of steel last a century,” Feiden said.
For larger projects, the Office of Planning and Sustainability identified two potential endeavors – a connection between the Mill River Greenway and the soon-to-be-refurbished Hotel Bridge in Leeds and trail development at the recently purchased Pine Grove Golf Course.
“People mostly asked questions at the meeting so I can’t say there was a clear consensus but the low-key water border approach all around the city would require a lot of volunteers and we didn’t have a lot of volunteers because the water borders we have right now work. So I think we’re thinking that a couple of big projects make sense. At least that was my read on the meeting,” Feiden said. “The decentralized approach only works if we have a lot of volunteers – if we’re doing it on the staff level, we don’t have enough staff time. The big ticket items don’t require that same level of staff time ... Absent volunteers, that will make our decision for us.”
No definitive plan has been made as of yet, however, and Feiden said his office remains open for additional input and volunteer interest. “We’re probably not going to make a decision for a couple of weeks,” he noted. In either scenario, the grant funding must be used by June 30, 2022.
Northampton One was developed when Northampton’s Open Space, Recreation and Multi-Use Trail Plan was updated in 2018. Feiden explained that during that process, it was noted that while Northampton has more walking trails than most other municipalities with nearly 25 percent of the city protected, they are not interconnected the way they are in many neighboring communities.
“Northampton has an enormous amount of walking trails, but it doesn’t have a lot of perception because we have a lot of conservation areas and they have lots of trails but they don’t all connect. You’ll walk to a conservation area and walk a mile and then you’re done,” Feiden explained. “One of the suggestions that came out of that plan was to create this trail on paper, Northampton One, that circumnavigates the city and connects many of our conservation areas and our urban areas for planning purposes.”
The idea, he said, is to give the public a frame of reference as to how the public can enjoy these spaces at once and how they might connect to other resources.
“The first piece is existing trails in conservation areas that may be connected. Some people could do the trail in a single day and some would do it over the course of several weeks,” Feiden said. “In fact, it may even connect to the New England Scenic Trail, which goes all the way to Long Island Sound and up to the New Hampshire border, so you can sort of choose your path, sort of like our bike paths.”
Additionally, introducing the public to all of the various trails available to them can help prevent overuse, Feiden said.
“We love all of our conservation areas and we don’t have major problems like big cities do of horrible abuse, but some places get a lot of foot traffic,” he said. “One of the goals of this is to show people there are other places to go.”
The MassTrails Grant award currently in question came about as a result of focus groups in 2019 that laid the foundation for potential routes and a subsequent application in 2020 based on that initial work.
Meanwhile, Feiden’s office has also been working on long-range goals tied in with the Northampton One initiative – specifically land acquisition. The city, he explained, purchases between 100 and 250 acres of land for open space annually for various purposes including ecological restoration and conservation. Northampton One is the newest of those interests. “There are some gaps. If you look at the map of Northampton, with all these greenways and conservation areas, there are gaps in between and in almost every one we are trying to buy land,” he said.
As Northampton One and connected projects progress, the city is exploring various funding sources from the Community Preservation Act to federal funding like MassTrails or Land and Water Conservation Fund grants through the National Parks Service.
“This is a 10 or 20 year project, but that’s how our bike paths began,” said Feiden.