Corduroy Brook receives funding

The most popular natural attraction in Grand Falls-Windsor, next to the Exploits River, is getting a boost - 130,000 boosts, to be precise.

That was the dollar figure announced Friday by government, the Corduroy Brook Enhancement Association and the National Trails Coalition (NTC).

National Defence Minister Peter MacKay, speaking on behalf of Gary Lunn, Minister of State for Sport, and NTC representative Terry Norman made the announcement, stating that the $130,000 would be used for creating jobs and revitalizing the trail.

Actually, Ottawa only provided $65,000 under its Economic Action Plan; $50,000 came from the province and the other $15,000 is the regular grant from the Town of Grand Falls-Windsor.

CBEA president Terry Paul called the project a "fantastic opportunity" to improve the existing infrastructure. He said the trail is a popular facility and hundreds of people use the trail system daily.

While the funding is appreciated, it certainly wasn't a surprise to the association, according to Executive Director and Project Manager Barry Manuel.

"We did apply and it was a fairly involved application process," he explained.

Funding applications were received between May 26 and June 26 of this year.

"We found out we had the approval and we started the project as soon as we could," he said. "A lot of the things we're doing are weather sensitive and we want to make sure we can get everything done as much as possible before the snow arrives."

Eleven people were hired and have already been working on the trail. The main work completed so far has to do with the boardwalk, said Mr. Manuel. He also said two or more jobs are expected to be created.

"In around Corduroy and Little Corduroy Ponds there's been a number of boardwalks that have been giving us some concerns, whether in need of repair or in some cases, replacement," he said. "We did a lot of work to replace those. Not all of it is replaced, of course. We picked the worst spots and tried to replace those, and hopefully we'll have an occasion to address the other issues down the road. But there's only so much we can handle, with the weather."

The funding will also come in handy to address the facility's signage needs. The executive director explained there are several different components to that aspect of the project. One is information signage. Trail users will notice new signs designed to communicate information to users such as rules to obey when riding a bicycle or walking a dog on the trail, or areas where the difficulty of the trail increases.

The workers have also been installing directional signage in the form of arrows so that there is no confusion for users, particularly new trail users, as where they will be going on the trail system.

"Those have been installed, and also there's the archway signage," said Mr. Manuel. "The archways are in varying degrees of conditions and we've been replacing a lot of them with new pressure-treated timber archways and in many cases, new signboards as well."

He added this funding does not include plans to extend the 15-kilometre trail system, but he doesn't rule it out for the future.