Katy Trail connection to Kansas City budget approved by Missouri General Assembly

The KCStar's Mike Hendricks wrote:

If things work out, Missouri’s cross-state hiking-biking path will reach the Kansas City area three years from now, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. That’s figuring in time to schmooze adjoining landowners and to plan and build a trail alongside the former Rock Island tracks between Windsor and Pleasant Hill.

Finally.

It looked as if it would never happen. But the way was cleared, as you’ll recall, by last year’s settlement in the Taum Sauk dam disaster lawsuit.

Next biggest deal: Missouri lawmakers approved funding, despite fears they’d find another way to blow the $18 million set aside for trail development.

MoBikeFed has kept in contact with DNR officials throughout the legislative session, and they indicate that they feel they can solve all potential problems--trail design, property rights issues, road and stream crossings, and all the rest--within the $18 million budget that is alloted for the project and within the project 3-year time frame.

The trail from Windsor to Pleasant Hill will be a trails with rails project, with the trail being placed alongside the existing railroad track so that the railroad can (potentially) be reactivated at some future time.

As Hendricks outlines in the article, the approach of the trail to the Kansas City metro area has put local efforts to connect to the trailhead in Pleasant Hill into overdrive.

So soon after the trail reaches Pleasant Hill--which should be some time in 2011 if DNR's timeline holds--we may see connections made to nearby communities like Lee's Summit, Kansas City, and even Johnson County Kansas.

In addition, bicycle/pedestrian crossings of the Missouri River in Kansas City are underway and at least one crossing should be online by 2011.

This opens the potential to create the trail connection from the Katy Trail through the Kansas City area to St. Joseph, Omaha, Lincoln, and beyond--as envisioned in the Quad States Trail vision.

Increasing the size of Missouri's statewide trail network--eventually reaching within 2 miles of over 2 million Missouri residents--is one of the goals in MoBikeFed's Vision of Active Transportation in Missouri. Creating the Katy Trail link to the Kansas City metro area is one of the most important connections needed to make that goal a reality.