By Wade Coggeshall
The Hendricks County Parks and Recreation Department received notice Thursday from the Indiana Department of Transportation that it’s been approved for a Transportation Enhancement Program (TEP) grant it applied for in August.
The county had requested $1 million in TEP funds to acquire property and easements in order to extend the National Road Heritage Trail from Amo to Cartersburg Road. Ultimately INDOT awarded $665,238 to the county, out of about $940,000 available.
Joe Spear, INDOT’s program coordinator for the Crawfordsville District, said the federal government normally allocates about $20 million annually to TEP. Of that about 20 percent is given to metropolitan planning organizations to disburse among their local agencies for transportation enhancement projects. While much of Hendricks County is in the Indianapolis Metropolitan Planning Organization, its parks department is not. They applied for this TEP grant through the Crawfordsville district. The rest was allocated to Rockville for a street-lighting project along its U.S. 41 corridor.
“Considering that’s all they had to distribute and we ranked as highly as we did, I think that’s wonderful,” said Bill Roche, Hendricks County parks director.
Because TEP grants are awarded ahead of time, the actual funds won’t be available for a couple of years yet. And costs being what they are, Roche says the grant won’t cover all the land acquisition needed to extend what’s known as the Vandalia Trail from Amo to Cartersburg Road.
“It’s a start,” Roche said. “It’s not going to get us all the way there, but it’s a great beginning.”
The ultimate goal is to have the National Road Heritage Trail stretching 150 miles from Terre Haute to Anderson, including a 20-mile portion through Hendricks County. Parts are already developed here, including the aforementioned three-mile Vandalia Trail, which connects Coatesville to Amo, and a couple of miles in Plainfield.
“Our county has pretty much been a leader in the development of this,” Roche said. “This is part of a national trail system envisioned to eventually link states.”
TEP, which has been around a number of years, is meant for such transportation-related, non-traditional projects. And Spear said Gov. Mitch Daniels has been a strong proponent of developing an advanced trail system in Indiana.
“He, as well as us, would like to see people using these trails to get around to other communities instead of always having to use their cars,” Spear said. “It provides good exercise and helps keep emissions down. It also makes for safer transportation. The big plan is for a lot of these trails to connect and take you from one community to the next.”
And Roche says Hendricks’ portion of the NRHT is a model other communities could duplicate. There’s already an equestrian trail that parallels Vandalia, which he also hopes to extend.
“This equestrian trail will eventually link many communities,” he said. “It could go all the way from Clayton to maybe Greencastle and beyond. You can’t really find anything else like it in the state right now.”
wade.coggeshall@flyergroup.com
