They built the trails and bikers came. But now one lawmaker wants to make sure the trails — and their users — stick around.
State Rep. Bill Friend, R-Macy, has authored a bill that would set aside a portion of one day's sales taxes to go to the state's recreational trail maintenance fund. The bill is now under consideration in the Indiana House's Committee on Ways and Means.
House Bill 1220 stipulates that 10 percent of the state sales tax collected on the first Saturday of June — National Trails Day — be set aside for continued maintenance of the state's multi-use recreational trails, such as the Panhandle Pathway in Cass and Pulaski counties and the Nickel Plate Trail in Fulton, Miami and Howard counties.
That would divert an estimated $2 million to $2.2 million to the trails maintenance fund, according to a fiscal report prepared by the Indiana Legislative Services Agency. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources would administer the monies.
The fund has existed for some time, "but it doesn't have any money in it," Friend said.
And while Friend isn't known as a big advocate for trails — "I think they're pretty inefficient and government is always accused of being inefficient," he explained — now that the state has them, it should take care of them, he said.
"I try to be a good steward," Friend said. "They're now considered assets and you have to maintain the assets."
Since launching its Hoosiers on the Move greenways and bikeways development plan in 2006, the state has added an estimated 850 miles of recreational trails, according to a Hoosiers on the Move progress report released last month. That brings the state's total trail mileage to 3,509 — with another 103 miles of trails being acquired or developed.
The development plan's goal was to establish a trail within 7.5 miles, or 15 minutes, of every Hoosier resident by 2016. A grant program, the Recreational Trails Program, provided funding for up to 80 percent of the cost of building new recreational trails. But non-municipally owned trails like the Panhandle and Nickel Plate routes rely on volunteer labor and fundraising for the regular maintenance they require.
"If it's an asphalt trail, every so many years you have to come through and put a seal coat of some kind on it, or it starts to crumble and crack," Friend pointed out. "And then it's really expensive to repair."
Winamac resident John Bawcum knows that firsthand and has been trying to keep decay at bay. As president of the Friends of the Panhandle Pathway, he and several other volunteers spent two weekends last fall sealing 3.5 miles of the Panhandle trail.
"One of the things that we said early on, was if we're going to have this much money invested in the trail, we're going to do everything we can practically speaking to keep it looking as nice as it did when it was built," Bawcum said. "That's a lot of work."
Trails may also have bridges and culverts to maintain, railings, signs and fences to repair, drainage issues to solve and brush and weeds to keep under control, Friend added.
When the Panhandle volunteers spoke with leaders responsible for similar trails throughout the Midwest in 2008, they found out maintenance would average an estimated $1,000 per mile, per year, including a budget for once-in-a-blue-moon projects like paving. The Panhandle now extends about 21 miles from Winamac south to near France Park in Cass County.
"We're in no way collecting that kind of money from the barbecues and chicken dinners" the Panhandle hosts as fundraisers, Bawcum said.
The same is true for the group taking care of the Nickel Plate Trail, a 40-mile line headed from Rochester through Peru and south to Cassville in Howard County and one of the longest recreational trails in the state.
Nickel Plate Trail Inc., the volunteer-run nonprofit, spent about $12,000 last year to maintain the trail. "If we weren't using volunteers ... it would be way different," NPT President Mike Kuepper said.
He also said state funding for trails maintenance would "really be a godsend to us."
"There's things that we could do to be proactive," Kuepper explained. "We don't have the funds now to be proactive, for instance, on a big item like asphalt."
If funding weren't an issue, he offered, he'd apply a material to the Nickel Plate's asphalt surface that soaks into the asphalt and extends its life. The material costs about 10 percent of the cost of paving, he said, and would allow them to "be better stewards of the money over time."
An earlier attempt to put resources into the trails maintenance fund failed. Friend last year had authored a bill to levy a $25 fee on each adult bike sold in Indiana, but "suddenly I became a leper," he recalled. "It was a tax increase."
He admitted that under this year's proposal, all Hoosiers would be paying for the trails maintenance, not just trails users. "But then, it's a statewide trail program that we now have, and everyone would have access to those trails," he said.
And in any case, this year's proposal is likelier to succeed, he added.
"The beauty of what I'm trying to do," Friend said, is "we don't create any more bureaucracy and we don't require silly things like law enforcement looking at the center post of a bicycle to see if it's got the right sticker on it.
"It's just you shift the money from one account to the other in the computer, or on the ledger, and it's done."
Kuepper suggested that the loss to the state's general fund would be negligible, too — "minor enough that it wouldn't be noticed."
And businesses might turn the day into a promotional opportunity, he added.
"This is the best [proposal] I've seen," Kuepper said.