The City Council is expected to vote today on a resolution that would allow the Chattanooga Department of Transportation to pursue state grant funding for a greenway that would create a bicycle and pedestrian connection between Alton Park and the Tennessee Riverwalk.
The proposed shared-use path would begin near the intersection of Central Avenue and 38th Street and follow an abandoned rail corridor north to West 33rd Street and then west to a portion of the Riverwalk that will soon run parallel to St. Elmo Avenue.
"Residents of Alton Park, they need safe access ways to get to areas like St. Elmo and downtown," said Councilman Chris Anderson, who represents the area of the proposed project. "It's an area that those types of things have been neglected in for years. Hopefully this will correct some of that."
If the council approves the resolution, the city's transportation department will be authorized to pursue a Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grant from the Tennessee Department of Transportation for design and construction of the project.
The total cost of the project is $2.2 million, and the grant would cover 80 percent, leaving the city to pay $440,000.
"It's a pretty big price tag, and it's specific only to my district, so there were a couple of questions about it," Anderson said. "But no one indicated that they were going to vote no."
The Trust for Public Land is engaged in negotiations with CSX Transportation to acquire the rail corridor that will be used for the project, trust state director Rick Wood confirmed Monday.
"It's a really great project," Wood said. "We're really excited about this, because it's right in line with our mission of putting all Chattanoogans within a 10-minute walk of a park."
A new portion of the Riverwalk that will run from Ross's Landing to Middle Street, near Crust Pizza, is expected to open later this summer. That's where the Alton Park Greenway would end.
From there, the Riverwalk is scheduled to be extended even further south to the St. Elmo village area in 2017.
"The ability to connect neighborhoods to the Riverwalk, especially neighborhoods that have a lot of people that rely on transit, walking or biking for transportation, is extremely important, and that is the case in Alton Park," city transportation director Blythe Bailey said. "We felt like this project was really important."
Contact staff writer David Cobb at dcobb@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.