MORGANTOWN — Construction on some, if not all, of the new White Park trail and bridge will not begin until spring of 2024.
Morgantown Staff Engineer Drew Gatlin explained as much during BOPARC’s most recent regular meeting.
“The bridge itself, which is going to be the main access down to the south side, is likely not going to be able to be built in 2023. So we’re looking at 2024; early spring 2024,” Gatlin said.
The bridge/trail project is being led by the city and funded by the Morgantown Utility Board as the agreed-upon remediation that allowed the utility to run a gravity-fed water line through the park in 2019. That line connected MUB’s water treatment center to the new Flegal Dam and Reservoir being built on Cobun Creek Road.
The city has a trail design in hand. Gatlin referred to is as “a lollipop design” with a bridge providing access to a large loop on the south side of the existing reservoir within the park.
The city is still working on the bid package for the actual trail construction.
The major delay, Gatlin explained, is with the bridge. That’s more federal in nature.
Morgantown Assistant City Manager Emily Muzzarelli said the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood data for the park appears to be inaccurate, and that’s causing a problem.
“What we’ve found out is the level that they say the water gets up to during certain storms, it’s literally impossible for it to be correct,” she said, explaining that according to FEMA, a two-year storm would over top the dam.
Building the bridge high enough to satisfy FEMA will be extremely complex and expensive. Building it below that mark will mean getting the agency to take another look at its data.
A smaller bridge will also likely require supports in the waterway, which then becomes an issue for the Army Corps of Engineers.
“Those two things combined; lowering the bridge and being able to put supports within the watercourse will help lower the cost of that bridge and lower the maintenance of the bridge,” Muzzarelli said. “It just sometimes takes time.”
The city is using that time to go after grant dollars through the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Voluntary Remediation Program.
The hope is that a sizable grant from the DEP will help finance the future of White Park, which sits on land that was formerly part of the South Morgantown Tank Farm. At its height, the farm likely stored more than two million barrels of oil in nearly 80 tanks and covered around 700 acres.
“I don’t think the city or MUB would have tolerated or entertained us applying for an EPA cleanup grant to help fund this without those complications. But knowing the writing on the wall with the bridge – either we’re going to have to battle Army Corps or FEMA, or both, and both of those are six-to-nine-month processes – that allowed us to consider that cleanup grant as an opportunity to flesh out amenities and trails on the south side,” Gatlin said.
Gatlin went on to say that a public planning session for White Park will begin “very soon.”
“These types of delays, in hindsight, were inevitable,” he said. “We just didn’t know.”
