An uncommon Thread

Last Thursday was an all-day meeting for the Carolina Thread Trail. The Thread Trail is an effort to get 15 counties to work together to unify their respective green-way plans. Within these 15 counties, there are probably 75 different municipalities that will need to get along. I am sure getting these folks to play together is like the proverbial kitty herding. The 800 pound gorilla smack dab in the middle of this 15 county universe would be Charlotte which makes all the other towns look like little satellites orbiting the Charlotte "Sun" while trying not to get pulled in and obliterated. The idea is to get each municipality to share their plan while using the counties to fill in the blank space between the towns. In Iredell County, home of Statesville, we have 3 towns plus the county government. What we need to do is get Mooresville, Troutman and Statesville working together to form their own plans and then get Iredell County to join the three plans together. Then Iredell county works with the adjacent counties to plan joining spots at the county borders. Hypothetically, when connected, there could be 500 miles of trails connected together!! This is a huge project and the talk is of 20+ years which likely means 40+ but it has to start somewhere.

Anyway, Thursday brought together 200 of these planners to listen to experts at each phase of green-way building: planning, funding, opposition, construction, maintenace and the selling of the concept to landowners. It sure made for a long day but it was a great learning experience. We even had an exercise at the end where you had to plan and build a trail on a map with your team members. It was interesting to balance the desires of different user groups with the given budget.

All in all, a great (but long) day. We even worked with the organizers to give away a Trek 4300 Disc mountain bike to one of the participants. If you get a chance, check out their web site at www.carolinathreadtrail.org