Options narrowed down for Ottawa County bike path

PORT CLINTON - With 2018 being declared the “Year of the Trails” by the Ohio Senate, locals are continuing to work on a plan for a bike path that would connect Ottawa County east-to-west.

The Ohio General Assembly even has a trails caucus, which in part helped lead to the passage of the “Year of the Trails” resolution.

While the resolution is nonbinding and has no money in it, Linda Amos, of Poggemeyer Design Group, said one of the goals it established was to have Ohio’s statewide plan for trails updated by the end of 2018.

Poggemeyer Design Group, along with a steering committee made up of 19 local officials and county residents, are developing a local leg of that, Ottawa County’s Active Transportation Plan.

Danbury resident Dennis Patthoff, a civilian on the steering committee, said his understanding was that the legislators’ trails caucus also intended to take a look at how trails are funded and how to better coordinate in the future.

Amos, who has extensive experience with grant applications, said that when, for example, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources is considering grant applications, officials ask, “Does it comply with the state’s plan?”

“I think that’s a critical piece of information because if you get your planned routes in the system, when you go to ask for money, you’re in the (state) plan,” Amos said. “It’s just a leg up. It’s important that we get our plan in their plan.”

While the steering committee has not yet hammered precisely where the bike path would be located, they have narrowed down the connections they are looking to make.

Greg Bieszczad, of Poggemeyer, has developed a map with key corridors, or connections, outlined for the whole county.

“Probably the most obvious corridor is an east-west one, connecting basically along the Portage River,” Bieszczad said.

This would connect Elmore on the west and Port Clinton to the east.

A connection of Elmore to Genoa, continuing along the North Coast Inland Trail in the southwest corner of the county, is already being developed.

The next major corridor would then connect Port Clinton to Marblehead on the eastern edge of the county. Those connections, Elmore to Port Clinton to Marblehead, would serve the most people initially.

“It does pretty well cover the most populated areas of the county, I think,” Bieszczad said.

The third large-scale corridor, but perhaps the furthest away in terms of actually being constructed, would be a connection to all of the various wildlife areas in the northern part of the county along Ohio 2, such as the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge and Magee Marsh Wildlife Area.

“It’s a pretty impressive chain of various parks, wildlife preserves, that are of international significance with all of the bird watching we hear about every spring,” Bieszczad said.

Though there was a lot of interest from the public, naming those areas as important destinations, Bieszczad noted that there are also a lot of different entities involved and other things that have to be considered, such as not disturbing the wetlands.

Amos said there are ways to develop trails at those kinds of locations, such as with the use of boardwalks, but it is more complicated than the typical, more straightforward, trails funded by the Ohio Department of Transportation.

“The closer we can get to a single line, the better, but we’re not in a position to detail a lot of that stuff at this point,” Bieszczad said.

Read more about the bike path development:

More:Ottawa County developing plan for new bike path

More:County, villages agree on bike path extension effort

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