UPDATE on BDTrail Bridge Designs
August 16th, 2009 Posted in News | No Comments »14 August 09
Hi BDTEN!
We hope you’re enjoying these gorgeous summer days.
We want to update you on our Black Diamond Trail:
To refresh your memory–the $209,000 windfall that Finger Lake Parks
received from the county in May was earmarked for two BDT bridge designs,
with the stipulation that FL Parks add another 20% matching funds.
The word this week from Tim Joseph, Regional Director of Finger Lakes
Parks, is that “we [FL Parks] are trying to do an open ended design
consultant contract with C&S Engineering that will then allow us to assign
a number of projects to them. When that’s done we will assign them the
Black Diamond bridges. Because they did the design report, this should let
us do the designs for a lower cost. The contract has been approved by
Parks, and the Budget Office, and is awaiting approval from the
Comptroller.”
When pushed for an anticipated date for receiving that approval from the
NYS Comptroller’s Office, Tim Joseph wrote that the end of August or
beginning of September “is most likely.”
We’ll let you all know as soon as that approval comes through so you can
start getting your hopes up.
We want to thank the American Society of Civil Engineers Student Chapter
at Cornell, especially Nicole Dufalla (student) and Tony Ingraffea
(faculty adviser) for their time and enthusiasm in discussions that led to
their offering to do at least one of these bridge designs for free. As it
turned out, receiving the county $$ in May allowed FL Parks instead to
hire the engineering firm that had already done the design “report” (which
is a preliminary to the actual design).
We’ll be in touch again in September — with good news, we hope. In the
meantime, keep the trail on your mind, use it at your pleasure, and tell
everyone you know about it so that when the time comes to muster our
combined energies, we’ll be ready!
Jan
http://blackdiamondtrail.org
Please consider signing the petition to urge completion of the Cayuga Waterfront Trail.