More than 100 people stood on the hot black asphalt of the Henderson County Visitors Center parking lot Friday afternoon, waiting – most with their bike helmets on – for an announcement almost 20 years in the making.
Henderson County Commissioners and other local leaders formally announced the first section of the multi-million dollar Ecusta Trail project is officially open to bikers and pedestrians.
“ We want to take this occasion again to thank all of the dreamers, the designers, the contractors, the donors, the state of North Carolina, all of those that donated funds as well as in-kind services, the government officials of the various jurisdictions and the staff people of the county and the other jurisdictions,” Bill Lapsley, chair of the Henderson County Commission, told the group.
He also thanked them for “sticking with us over all these years to see this wonderful project that we are now ready to open to the public.”
The trail project will transform an old railway corridor into a 19-mile path between Hendersonville and Brevard. The first five miles of the trail are complete, starting at the county’s visitor center and weaving west through the Horse Shoe community towards Brevard.
Friends of Ecusta Trail, a nonprofit group, collaborated with Conserving Carolina in 2019 to buy the land from the railroad company Watco. They paid for it with local and state grants, as well as private donors, according to their website.
Since then, the groups have secured more than $45 million in grants from the state and federal government for the project.
The section of the trail that opened last week was entirely state funded, according to Lapsley.
“When it's all done, the Henderson County section will have a 12-mile county-owned linear park, developed for $30.4 million using all state funds and no county general tax funds. And we're very proud of it,” he told the crowd Friday.
The city of Brevard is moving along with its plans for the Ecusta Trail, despite some federal grants for the project facing uncertainty due to ongoing review from the Trump administration.
City Manager Wilson Hooper said the U.S. Department of Transportation is reviewing the grants because the trail contains bike infrastructure. In March, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered a stop to all Biden-era grants to build bike lanes and other "green infrastructure" so the agency could review them.
“However, with that said, we're moving full speed ahead with the design of our section of the trail,” Hooper told BPR in April.
