Historic bridge along trail by Henrico County.

Engineering crews have already begun surveying the site of the Lakeside Community Trail⁠—a two mile walking and biking path in Henrico County just north of Richmond, but the fiscal uncertainty unleashed by the novel coronavirus threatens the timeline of its construction.

The funding for the trail was expected to come from a combination of state grant programs and local budgets, both of which have taken a huge hit due to COVID-19. Absent a quick market recovery or an infusion of regional dollars, the Lakeside Community Trail — the first phase of the 41 mile-long Ashland to Petersburg (ATP) Trail — may be delayed indefinitely.

While a newly formed regional body could funnel money to the projects to save them, it’s unclear how its members will decide to allocate their untapped dollars.

Local path, regional vision

The inception of the Lakeside Community Trail began with local efforts to better connect Greater Richmond. As Hanover County and the Town of Ashland planned to convert an old streetcar easement into a shared path known as the Trolley Line Trail, Henrico County conceptualized the Lakeside trail as a connector between the trolley trail and the rest of Richmond to create a truly regional amenity.

The long term vision is for the Lakeside Community Trail to align with both the ATP Trail as well as the East Coast Greenway, extending the utility of the path to the entire Eastern Seaboard.

“To build something as great as the Ashland to Petersburg Trail in an area that is as exciting culturally and geographically as Central Virginia will bring economic opportunity here beyond the money people spend just while they’re traveling through,” said Todd Eure, Assistant Director of Transportation & Development for Henrico County. “This is an amenity that will help bring in businesses by offering people a better quality of life.”

The Lakeside Community Trail is currently in the early stages of its design. Eure’s team has completed the preliminary alignment and hired an engineer to handle the ground surveying. The next step involves detailed engineering and design for the trail’s upper two phases from Dumbarton Road to Hilliard Road.

The county’s decision to prioritize the two upper phases of the trail stems from the project’s reliance on a Transportation Alternatives Program grant from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT).

With government coffers in chaos, however, no one is sure where the rest of the money will come from to complete the Lakeside Community Trail. And if Henrico can’t find the funding it needs for the local trail, the region could lose the momentum behind the ATP Trail.

“Henrico is taking the first step out of all our jurisdictions to find and allocate money we could commit to building these sections of trail,” said Chet Parsons of PlanRVA—the Richmond region’s metropolitan planning authority. “That all started this year with several SMART SCALE applications Henrico submitted this year. Demonstrating some success here is going to be important to show other jurisdictions that they can have a similar success if they just pick up the ball and keep running with it.”

Map of Lakeside Community Trail by Henrico County.

In his first proposed city budget in March, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney chose to put 15 times more funding toward road paving than investments in biking and walking. However, studies have shown the better economic bet is on infrastructure for people, not cars. According to Sportsbackers—a local athletics nonprofit, “every million dollars spent on greenway, sidewalk, and bicycle facility projects creates 17 direct jobs on average, compared to just 9 jobs for pavement improvement projects.”

There’s always money in the CVTA

Even though COVID-19 has caused Greater Richmond’s localities and the broader Commonwealth to take serious fiscal hits, there is one source of untapped dollars the region’s leaders can look to: the newly formed Central Virginia Transportation Authority (CVTA).

Before the pandemic, the CVTA was expected to generate a whopping $170 million per year to invest in transportation projects across the nine localities which constitute the body. Although that figure has surely been diminished by the virus, the new taxes should still generate enough revenue to fund the construction of the ATP Trail and all of its component parts, including the Lakeside Community Trail.

While localities are expected to begin appointing representatives to the CVTA over the next couple weeks, the group’s official launch won’t be until October due to tweaks to the bill which created the CVTA by Governor Northam.

Whether the new regional body will choose to invest in practical cycling and walking projects or more expensive highway extensions remains to be seen. “We’ll know in the next six months what the focus of the CVTA’s investment will be. We’re hoping our office can help its members prioritize which projects need funding assistance going forward,” said Parsons.

Even assuming Henrico can find all of the funding it needs, the grand opening of the Lakeside Community Trail is at best three and a half years away based on the county’s best projections. If the new walking and biking path gets delayed by a lack of funds, Eure is concerned about what county residents will say. At a community meeting in September, he said, “The top questions we got from the public were ‘how soon can you make this happen?’ and ‘how much stuff can we try and connect this trail to?’”

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.