The Jurupa Valley City Council last week voted unanimously to move forward with creating a citywide Trails Master Plan as part of the larger Jurupa Area Recreation and Park District (JARPD) Master Plan project.
“We’re looking to leverage a current contract that is with JARPD, and it’s their Master Park Plan effort,” Michael Flad, assistant city manager, said. “The real benefit of that is we reduce a lot of time — about three to four months — and you reduce cost.”
Flad said the city was in need of the master plan to improve the safety, functionality and maintenance of the city’s existing trail system.
“The current trail system, as you all know very well, lacks connectivity,” he said. “In some areas, we have great trails and in other areas they’re non-existent. We want to make that network complete.”
Berry Dunn, the firm currently working with JARPD on its master plan, has already started to inventory a lot of the city’s trails, put together a website and form focus groups, which Flad said was work that would be leveraged for the Trails Master Plan.
Part of the master plan effort will be community outreach to see what residents’ priorities are, the places they want to get to and from using the city’s trails and the barriers to being able to do that whether it’s that the trail doesn’t currently exist or if it’s a safety issue such as having to cross a major thoroughfare in the city.
The final report will provide the city with an estimate of how much it will cost to implement the recommendations from the master plan document, how much the city has to spend on trails and how much it will need to seek through grants and other funding sources.
The expanded project will cost $95,000 and will be covered by development impact fees, which are one-time fees paid by developers to cities and other agencies to offset the impacts resulting from the development.
“Those dollars are held until projects like this come forward, and they have specific goals to be attained,” Flad said. “This falls within the goals of our trails program.”
Flad said the city would soon be bringing forward to council a recommendation to use development impact fee funds for a Santa Ana River Master Plan and purchasing land on the western side of the community for the development of a fire station.
“I’m happy that we’re now at a point where we’ve collected enough of these development impact fees and that they’re now able to be deployed and start to be used for what they were intended to be used for,” he said.
A video of the meeting can be found here on the city’s website.
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