City Of Estherville Awarded Grant For Water Trail Project
City Of Estherville Awarded Grant For Water Trail Project
March 24, 2022Steve Schwaller
(Estherville)– The city of Estherville has been awarded a little more than $30,000 through a Water Trails Development Grant. City Administrator Penny Clayton says it will go toward the construction of an access point near the former Riverview Golf Course on the West Fork of the Des Moines River. She says it will consist of a granular drive, a concrete boat ramp, and some parking…
“We don’t have any floats of this length in Emmet county and so that was one of the things that came out of the state designation process. We did a planning process, talked about all of the good projects we could do. Midway Access kind of rose to the top of the things we should be doing for the water trails group, in addition to some things we that need to do as the city, like the dam mitigation stuff, which is also, that’s a different component, but in the same division of work. I applied for a grant for the dam mitigation as well but did not receive any funding this year, and so I’ll probably be making some changes to that grant application we submitted and re-working that a little bit with some better information for them to be able to award.”
Clayton says they’ll hold off on construction until they have the rest of the funding that’s needed…
“You know it’s a $212,000 project. This would be the first $30,000 of that. We have many more grants to receive and write before we are able to actually do the project, but we’re trying to target being done with that grant writing process by September so that we could actually do work next summer.”
Clayton says the city of Estherville won’t have any long-term expense for future maintenance of the access…
“The goal would be for Emmet County Water Trails Association, which is a private 501C3, to then deed it to the county conservation who has agreed to take ownership of it in the long term, so we wouldn’t have any ongoing expense after that, but we want to get the project done and then turn it over.”
The city council Monday authorized the acceptance of the grant money.
