The Bennett Road path will now be completed, extending from South Akins to the Valley Parkway. The extension will take place with a grant award to the city from the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA). The original portion of the path was installed when Bennett Road was reconstructed in 2012. The original path was constructed from asphalt, is eight feet wide and is located on the west side of Bennett Road.
Mayor Bob Stefanik make the announcement of the grant at his State of the City address last month. The city sought the grant from NOACA through the Transportation of Livable Communities Initiative, a federal program. The program “provides assistance to communities and public agencies for integrated transportation and land use planning and projects that strengthen community livability,” according to NOACA officials. The program is broken down into two components: planning and implementation. The planning component assists in funding planning studies that may lead to transportation system improvements. Implementation awards assist communities in infrastructure development and installation that have been highlighted in previous studies. Last summer, the city also was notified of funding in the amount of $108,000 from this project for the sidewalk project that will connect Memorial Park on State Road, north, to Rt. 82.
North Royalton’s Alternative Transportation Plan was one of 31 applications that NOACA received for the 2018 funding. The total amount available was $2,071,700. Applications were received between August 11 and October 6, 2017. Of those applications, fourteen planning studies were requested at a cost of $1.1 million. Seventeen applications were implementation projects, at a cost of $5.5 million. The North Royalton project is considered an implementation project. “We asked for full funding of the extension and that’s what we are getting,” said Stefanik. The project is expected to cost $141,000.
Due to federal requirements, the new section of the path will be a little wider, but similar to what is currently there. ODOT will be responsible for the bidding and construction of this project, according to North Royalton Community Development Director Tom Jordan. The city expects the project to be bid out some time this year. The construction timeframe is not known at this time.
Once completed, the Bennett Road path will then connect to the Metropark All Purpose Trail. “A new 10 foot wide paved trail along Valley Parkway is in the process of being constructed in two phases within Brecksville Reservation between Ridge Road in North Royalton and Brecksville Road in Brecksville. Phase I of the Valley Parkway Connector Trail will extend over three miles to provide a paved trail between Broadview Road in Broadview Heights to Brecksville Road . At Broadview Road, it will connect with the existing trail that accesses the City of Broadview Heights’ administrative and recreation complex to the north,” according to Metroparks Senior Strategic Park Planner, Sara Byrnes Maier. . “With completion of the approximately three miles of Phase Il in 2018, there will be a continuous off-street paved all purpose trail from Detroit Avenue in Lakewood in the Rocky River Reservation to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and Towpath Trail, which extends to New Philadelphia to the south and will soon extend to downtown Cleveland and the lakefront.” Phase II of the project will connect to the existing all purpose trail at the Stuhr Woods Picnic Area and on to the Mill Stream Run Reservation. “The whole project will be finished this year,” said Jordan. “They are shooting for an official opening for the fall of this year.”

By GLORIA PLEVA KACIK
Contributing Writer