Waterfront trail extension survives the budget line
It was on the list to defer. It came off the list on Tuesday night, and the reason was the underpass.
The extension was one of six items staff flagged for deferral. Five of them were deferred.
What kept this one alive was the underpass at the east end: deferring the trail would have left a lit, finished tunnel connecting nothing to nothing for two more years.
Construction begins in the spring.
The underpass was built first because it was the expensive part and because the grant that paid for it expired. That sequencing is normal and it is also how you end up with infrastructure that connects nothing: the hard piece goes in when the money exists, and the easy piece waits for a budget cycle that keeps deferring it.
Three of the five items that were deferred are trails.
The trail network has been assembled this way for twenty years: a stretch at a time, whenever a grant or a development agreement pays for one. It is why the map has four gaps and why closing any one of them is disproportionately valuable.
This extension closes the third of the four. The remaining gap is the hardest — it crosses private land — and nothing in this budget touches it.
