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County Adopts
Accelerated Greenway Plan
Greenways are among the most popular amenities the county provides. The Mecklenburg County Greenway Master Plan includes 308 miles of trails, and currently, only 52 miles of those are completed. Projects currently in design include the extension of the Walker Branch Greenway Trail from the existing trail at RiverGate Shopping Center south to Smith Road. The county will also resurface the existing Walker Branch trail. The addition will more than double the length of the trail to just over one mile. The path of the new greenway trail is currently accessible as a mowed dirt path, or DIRTway. The DIRTway will be upgraded to a 10-foot wide asphalt trail with a bridge across Walker Branch. The trail extension will have one neighborhood connector trail to the Walkers Creek neighborhood at the west end of Walkers Creek Drive along a public easement. Anticipated completion is in 2020. Please click HERE or on the map below to view a detailed map of the Walker Branch Greenway in PDF format. (This is a large file and may take some time to load.)
The map below shows current and planned trails on the county's Greenway Master Plan for the area around Walker Branch.
The existing Walker Branch Greenway Trail and the shorter trail along Hoover Creek were built by the developers of RiverGate. The extension of Walker Branch Trail to Smith Road will be the first greenway trail in Steele Creek built with Mecklenburg County tax dollars. The Accelerated Greenway Plan includes several new projects that had been unfunded previously, including the extension of the Walker Branch Greenway Trail north from South Tryon Street to Steele Creek Road at Sledge Road. This 1.5 mile extension is anticipated to be completed in 2023. For a discussion of the Walker Branch Greenway Trail from September 2018, see Walker Branch Greenway Expansion Plan Announced. Another part of the Accelerated Greenway Plan is to move other scheduled projects forward. These projects include the Sugar Creek Greenway Trail, which will run from Billy Graham Parkway past City Park on Tyvola Road and continue south across South Tryon Street to the McDowell Farms neighborhood. It is unclear whether this trail will extend to the McDowell Meadows neighborhood. The anticipated completion for this 3.3 mile trail has been moved up from 2027 to 2024 or later. (This is not part of the 30 miles to be completed by 2023.)
The total fiscal impact of the plan to construct the 30 miles of trails is $63,705,475. Please click on this link to view the information on the Accelerated Greenway Plan presented at the June 4 County Commission meeting. To comment on this story, please visit the Steele Creek Residents Association Facebook Page.
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(June
9, 2019) Last week the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners
adopted the county's 2019-2020 Fiscal Year Budget, which includes an
