The Mad River Path received a $600,000 Vermont Agency of Transportation Alternatives grant to connect the Lareau Swim Hole in Waitsfield to Irasville. It’s another in a long (and slow) string of successes that the path association and local towns have seen over the past few years.
With an overarching goal of connecting Warren to Middlesex with an alternative, non-mechanized route that is safe for pedestrians and cyclists, with side spurs to give people access to Sugarbush in Warren and to recreation trail networks in Waitsfield, plus swim holes along the way, this is an enormous and ambitious project.
Projects of this scale take vision and time, and a lot of hard work and kudos belong to the current leaders of the nonprofits who are spearheading this as well as the towns that are partnering and the state agencies that are helping.
In less than a decade, our community has received significant grant funding and accomplished amazing things in terms of providing non-motorized ways for people to move around, connect and play outside. One example is the $406,000 Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative (VOREC) grant created a rec hub, visitors’ center, pedestrian bridge, access to trail networks and Irasville.
The Sugarbush Access Road shared-use path received $769,280 in federal funds via Vermont’s Bicycle and Pedestrian grant program to complete the first segment of a path that connects workforce housing and trail networks along the access road. This will be an ADA complaint accessible path that addresses safety and commuting on one of our busiest roads.
Those are some of the larger projects and grants. There are so many smaller parts of this work and so much effort going into grant writing and securing the local matches where they are needed. It’s slow work. It requires applying, getting rejected, improving the application and trying again. It’s not fast and it’s not without a cost.
But it’s a real and valuable investment of the human capital that we fund in our town budgets. It reflects our priorities as a community. It demonstrates a vision for how we want people to be able to move and play and commute in the future.
It takes vision and time, and we’ve got both.
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