What’s the overall impact you’ve seen
since the trail’s development?
We don’t have counters on the trail yet,
but it’s used a lot by the community.
A stadium used by the public school
district is directly accessible from the trail.
On Friday evenings, you see people of all
shapes and sizes walking to the football
game instead of driving. You can also see
houses that have fresh coats of paint that
didn’t before.
A community garden was created at
the far end of the trail. There’s life in an
area that was once just an alleyway where
people would race cars and dump tires
and trash. Along many parts of the trail,
what once were little more than parking
lots are now vibrant places to walk and
bike.
The trail has given people pride in
their community.
What’s next for Brownsville?
Through a plastic bag ban fund, we were
able to put $200,000 toward creation of a
Hike and Bike Trail Master Plan. Twenty-
three miles of trails along a drainage canal
in another low-income area have been
planned and funded and are starting
construction.
What advice would you give other
communities seeking to improve health
and connectivity through walking and
biking infrastructure?
Find out what your biggest community
needs and risks are. In our case, it was dia-
betes. Then focus on building a group of
like-minded people that can build a foun-
dation [for action]. Then do something.
It doesn’t have to be a huge pie-in-the-sky
thing. When you do something simple
that is well received, you gain momentum
and drive to do the next thing, and the
next thing, and votes begin to turn. We
started with something small and began
to layer things on top of it. Now we have
a network across the city for walking and
bicycling that connects to our bus system.
Amy Kapp is editor-in-chief of
Rails to Trails
magazine.
what made the Belden rail-trail
project a priority?
The initial driver was the school of public
health in the early 2000s. They developed
a community advisory board made up of
representatives from grocery stores, hospi-
tals and clinics. We started writing news-
letters and sending community health
professionals into the neighborhoods to
talk about health and wellness.
As time went on, and more infor-
mation came out, the Brownsville
Community Improvement Commission
[BCIC] started listening more. And
where BCIC really built momentum was
on the issue of trails. The Belden Trail was
the first big push. [The project was first
conceptualized in 2009 and completed in
2013.] It’s located in West Brownsville,
in one of the lowest-income areas of our
city. There was a big opportunity to prove
how a trail could improve safety and
increase property values in a low-income
area. We were determined not just to
make a trail, but to make it a model for
other neighborhoods.
What made it possible to get this
project off the ground? Were there
any major challenges, and how did you
overcome them?
The conversation at the city level
prior to 2009 was not about build-
ing trails or sidewalks. We had only
one trail, 8 miles long, funded by the
Texas Department of Transportation
[TxDOT]. Brownsville had passed a
sidewalk ordinance and a Complete
Streets ordinance, but this was the first
trail anybody tried to fund without a big
funder like TxDOT.
A lot of people ask us how we did it
all in such a short time with very little
money. The answer: We had to get really
creative and leverage people’s dollars.
Because this project was led by BCIC
and not the city, it was more off the
radar. The BCIC had more leeway in its
design and in recruiting funding part-
ners. We started with a $150,000 Texas
Parks and Wildlife Grant and reached
out to our local bus system, which had
some grant funds to improve access to
bus stops. They used the funds to cre-
ate sidewalks to connect local neighbor-
hoods to the trail—and connect those
sidewalks to bus stops. It was the first
sidewalk project West Brownsville had
seen in 30 years.
We also reached out to the federal
Community Development Block Grant
[CDBG] program. We worked out an
even swap with the city; we gave them
the CDBG funds for their street proj-
ects, and they gave us funds for the trail’s
development. With all that, we were able
to put together $800,000 to complete
the trail.
We approached BuildingCommunity
Workshop, a nonprofit design firm in
Dallas that was working on a Ford Grant
with one of the city’s largest housing
developers to improve housing and trans-
portation. We asked them to design the
trail in order to improve transportation.
Ford liked the idea, and we got an excel-
lent designer for free.
How did the community respond
to the trail plans?
The design firm’s mantra is to never
design anything without first going to
the community. They hosted several
community meetings, and the rooms
were packed. From the outset, people
embraced the project.
At the far end of the trail corridor is
an elementary school and three small
homes that are separated from the cor-
ridor by a fence. The homeowners came
to the sessions and said, “We can’t let
our children out to play.” After the rail
was taken up, that part of the corridor
became a dirt alleyway. Teenagers would
go and race cars and do donuts, and they
would regularly knock into the fencing.
The families were afraid their kids would
get hit by a car.
We started extra police patrols until
we could block the alley off for trail
construction. Now those houses have
brand-new bicycles out front, and you
can see the kids walking on the trail to
school.
John Faulk/Frontera media
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