The next leg of the Eagle Valley Trail will kick off this year, but finishing the entire project remains complicated and expensive.
Eagle County Commissioner Jeanne McQueeney’s eyebrows raised May 20 when she saw a consent agenda item for a trail-related contract. But that momentary excitement was quickly tempered by the amount of the contract — a relatively modest $870,000 contract with HDR Engineering for construction management and engineering for phase one of a portion of trail construction.
That contract, it turns out, is for planning and oversight of a larger, more expensive project — building the leg of the trail between Horn Ranch, in the middle of Red Canyon, and the Colorado Department of Transportation maintenance yard just west of Wolcott.
That leg, which includes steep embankments and other tricky engineering and construction, carries a cost estimate of just more than $11 million. But that leg has also received a $5 million federal grant.
Eagle County Trails Program Manager Kevin Sharkey said that grant has a number of strings attached, including “buy American,” hiring “disadvantaged businesses” and paying prevailing wages. The grant also requires daily on-site inspections and daily reporting. The grant conditions also require more than one full-time person on-site to ensure compliance with all federal requirements.
Read the full story from our partner at vaildaily.com.
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