by Bea Peterson and Alex Brooks
A meeting was held on Wednesday evening, March 31, at the Hoosick Falls Fire House, to solicit community input on development of the riverside greenway in Hoosick Falls.
A committee of local residents organized by the Hoosic River Watershed Association (HooRWA) has been working for five years to turn the old abandoned railroad property along the river in the middle of Hoosick Falls into a greenway or park with hiking trail. They managed to purchase the property with privately donated money in January of 2009 and have secured two grants of about $100,000 each to be used for developing it further. The parcel now belongs to the Village of Hoosick Falls, and the project continues as a collaboration between HooRWA and the Village.
Toward this end, the landscape architecture firm Landworks, of Middlebury, VT, has been hired to work on developing a plan for the 26 acre property and its 2.5 mile hiking trail. Last Wednesday’s meeting was one of the first steps in this process.
The meeting began with an brief introduction by former Village Trustee Margaret Casey
and current Trustee Ric DiDonato, who gave some background on the history of the project. Casey asked that the meeting be dedicated to the late Mark Revet, who was a key member of the greenway committee for several years and served as the primary fund raiser for the land purchase. Revet’s life was cut short last fall by a plane crash.
DiDonato said the project has come a long way without using local taxpayer funds and he hopes to continue doing it that way. Funding for the project comes from State and Federal grants and from private donations.
They then turned the meeting over to Patrick Olstad of Landworks. He showed pictures of other greenways in the area by way of example and talked a bit about the positive impacts that had been seen from them.
Olstad outlined some of the goals of the project in his presentation. These are to create opportunities for outdoor recreational activities, to improve access to the river, to improve economic prospects for the Village, to improve real estate values in the Village and to create public spaces that facilitate community connections. Toward these ends, he asked for input from the community members present to help identify things like favorite spots, best access points to the trail and to the river and natural gathering spaces on the property, as well as areas of concern either for safety or aesthetics. He also commented on the rich historical heritage of the area and said he hopes to include historical information in the trail kiosks.
There were 40 to 50 people present, and they broke up into three groups to discuss these matters in detail, gathering around three large maps on which comments and suggestions were written.
A majority of those attending the meeting were high school students who had been encouraged to attend the meeting by some of their teachers. There were students present from Kim Hayden’s class called Science & Society, as well as from some of the government classes. The students were very interested in the project and eager to share their ideas.
Margaret Casey said she was thrilled and delighted with the turnout at the meeting as well as by the enthusiasm shown by the participants. She said some of the students told her afterwards that they would like to continue working on the project as it develops.
Kim Hayden was pleased with the contributions made by her students and also expressed her own enthusiasm for the greenway project, which she feels could become a great asset to the Village, improving both the quality of life and the economic climate.
There will be additional public meetings in the future as the greenway plans develop.
