Released: May 06, 2008

In Northeast Kansas, Volunteers Develop Recreational Area

MELVERN, Kan. – Without proposing a tax increase or increasing the mill levy, residents of many communities might dismiss the idea of developing a new recreational area.

But not in Melvern, Kan., pop. 435, where volunteers working on behalf of the community have planted 65 trees, built a 20-foot-long walking bridge across a ravine, cleaned up 40 acres of abandoned land, and developed seven miles of hiking, biking and walking trails.

Residents of Melvern have a strong commitment to protecting natural resources and building a healthy, sustainable community, said Sherry Davis, who has been working with community volunteers on an ambitious water-quality and natural resource management project on the Marais des Cygnes River as part of the Healthy Ecosystems-Healthy Communities (HEHC) Program.

Davis is a Kansas State University Research and Extension program coordinator for the HEHC program within Kansas PRIDE, a volunteer-based community development program administered by K-State and the Kansas Department of Commerce.

The HEHC program helps communities protect their local water resources through a combination of civic engagement and natural resource planning. It is funded by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment with Environmental Protection Agency 319 Water Quality Program funds and managed by Kansas’ PRIDE Program.

Work on the water-quality project helped the community to build new partnerships with other community and service organizations, such as the Kansas Corps, a student-volunteer group developed at Fort Hays State University, and Kansas Trails Council (KTC) and Westar Energy’s Green Team, which have helped the city design and build its new trails system.

This spring, more than 115 volunteers from such groups joined the community’s Friends of the Trail team to develop Melvern’s River Trails – seven miles of walking, rustic hiking and biking trails that also can serve as an outdoor classroom to teach residents of all ages about water quality and its importance to healthy communities and ecosystems, Davis said.

The site has it all – a healthy stand of trees and shrubs along a beautiful river, an abandoned quarry with high rock walls surrounding a natural wetlands area, and a natural amphitheatre and open meadow for public gatherings, she said.

More than 20 trailer loads of brush and limbs were cut and removed. Before the trail development could begin, 100 hundred large bags of trash and more than 30 tires also were removed from the site, which had previously served as a site for trash, tree limbs and brush disposal.

An educational brochure with tips to protect water quality and ecosystems will be available at the trail when the project is completed. For more information about opportunities for communities to improve water-quality and natural resource management and development through Kansas’ Healthy Ecosystems-Healthy Communities program, call Sherry Davis with the Kansas PRIDE Program at 785-313-5283 or e-mail her at sbd@ksu.edu.

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K-State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well-being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K-State campus, Manhattan.

Story by:
Nancy Peterson
nancyp@oznet.ksu.edu
K-State Research& Extension News