Trail system promoted - Lewis and Clark being used to spur interest
By Dean Baker, The Columbian Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 24, 2005
Kelly Punteney is looking for 500 Clark County neighbors to take a fresh look at a proposed countywide system of bike, hike and horseback trails.
He wants to bring enthusiasts and skeptics together for a festive brainstorming session at the Hilton Vancouver Washington on Nov. 4. Punteney, Clark County's trails and greenway park developer, said he wants to orchestrate "a minor paradigm shift." He wants people to look at trails as economic development tools, transportation corridors and pathways to good health, not just as recreational features.
An unabashed promoter of a new transportation model, Punteney is using Lewis and Clark's bicentennial as a jumping-off point to explore the future of trails.
Meeting on a date exactly 200 years after Lewis and Clark passed through Vancouver on their way to the Pacific, the group Punteney is putting together will explore the idea of building 250 miles of trails, 14 feet wide and suitable for walking, biking and horseback riding. The trails will save gasoline, promote development and bring trimmer waistlines, better health and a stronger community, he said.
The Hilton event, "Blazing New Trails 2006," asks participants to imagine a trail system as a key component of Clark County's future. The blueprint will be the new Clark County Trail & Bikeway System Plan, 1806 to 2006, a finished copy of which will be presented to the public on April 6, 2006, exactly 200 years to the day since Lewis and Clark passed through this area on their return trip to St. Louis.
"We've got a plan," said Punteney, "but it's rough and it needs a lot of polishing."
He's summoning to the event political leaders, developers and engineers, health professionals, history buffs, and horse, bike and walking enthusiasts, as well as other interested citizens. The group will socialize, share a meal and then sit down to talk seriously in small groups about the trail system.
"We want to air out all opinions," Punteney said.
He said there has to be a change. "We need a system that makes it easier to walk than to drive. Right now, we've got a system that makes it easier to drive than walk. That's the problem."
One can drive to the store easier than walk, he said. If that situation changed, many millions of dollars could be saved, health could improve, neighbors could slow down and talk to each other, he said.
"When I was doing parks, I was labeled a tree-hugger," he said. "Now I'll be labeled a bike-lover or a shoe-hugger. I don't know. The point is we've got to keep these alternatives out there in front of people, and I worry that we are not."
He sees the cost of the bike and hike paths as far less than that of highways. For example, a new Interstate Bridge might cost a billion dollars, he said.
"I see a good 14-foot-wide trail, hard surface, with lights and all, costing about a million dollars a mile." More primitive forest trails cost around $5,500 a mile, he said, and lots of these trails would be this less-expensive kind.
"Trails are good for real estate development. They are good for getting people off the roads. I can argue health issues over using the trails, kids safety, and health," he said. "I can argue the point that we would have corridors where we need them to observe natural elements birds for education, or recreation. Urban greenways are very complex."
Punteney said a goal is to install the trails away from streets and roads as much as possible along the old 33-mile-long Chelatchie Prairie Railroad from Vancouver north to Chelatchie Prairie, for example. He also wants to build trails through the back country as much as possible.
"We want to stay away from streets and roads, out of the carbon monoxide and away from the congestion," he said. He said use of trails could spur a new kind of development.
"Where would I look to buy land if I were in real estate?" asked Punteney rhetorically. "Along these trails."
He said he wants the trail system financed by grants and by alterations in existing priorities, not by any new taxes.
So he's hooking the county's hike, bike and horse trail plan to Lewis and Clark's coattails. That is being done, he said, under a new contract with MacKay & Sposito Inc., of Vancouver. The 1992 Clark County Trails & Bikeway System Plan will be rewritten and linked to the Discovery Greenway, a $50 million interstate trails system involving many city, state, county and regional agencies throughout the Portland-Vancouver area.
Trail sections range from the dirt paths of Portland's Forest Park to the Interstate 5 and 205 bridges. North of the river, the proposed trails could wind throughout Clark County, from Ridgefield to Washougal, including Vancouver's Renaissance and Discovery trails.
The goal is to complete the system over the next 20 years.