Ready to walk and bike? B&O connector trail, tunnel set for ribbon cutting Friday

MANSFIELD — A journey of about 2,000 steps is about to become available, connecting the Richland B&O Trail to Trimble Road.

On Friday at 2 p.m., the ribbon will officially be cut on a $2.1 million connector trail and a $1.2 million tunnel, providing another access point to the B&O without worries about vehicular traffic.

The event will take place at the east side of the tunnel. Parking is accessible off Raemelton Boulevard.

But the first steps on that 1.1 mile path began on a chilly October morning three years ago. And the ideas for the project date back seven years when City of Mansfield engineer Bob Bianchi proposed the idea to city officials.

“A project starts with a vision,” Bianchi told City Council in 2018. “It may take 20 years (to get the trail connected to the downtown.) We have got to start,” Bianchi said.

It was Oct. 18, 2022, when City of Mansfield and Richland County officials joined representatives from the Western Reserve Land Conservancy District, engineers from K. E. McCartney & Associates and the Richland County Park District to explore the path that has now become the connector between the B&O and Trimble Road.

the initial walk on the B&O trail connector

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“We have the funding. We are excited about this project,” City of Mansfield engineer Bob Bianchi told the group that gathered in the conservancy district’s small asphalt parking lot south of Marion Avenue.

The group then took to the woods, following a path laid out by McCartney & Associates, which was awarded the contract in September 2022 to design the connector. Construction contracts on the connector trail and the tunnel were both ultimately awarded to the Adena Corp. of Mansfield in a bidding process.

The 10-foot wide concrete trail was designed to meander through the Western Land Conservancy and property owned by OhioHealth. Both entities supported the project and entered into agreements to allow the city to construct the trail on their property.

On that crisp morning three years ago, Chris Szell, director of conservation project management for Western Reserve, said the district actually met with Bianchi in 2020 to walk the general path the group followed in 2022.

The idea for the connector was something Bianchi broached seven years ago in 2018.

“We had always envisioned it would become a community asset in this way,” Szell said at the time. “We didn’t know what long-term plans would be for the property in terms of how the community wanted to use it.”

(Below is a video recently produced by K.E. McCartney & Associates showing the connector trail and tunnel that links the Richland B&O Trail to Trimble Road in Mansfield.)

The path leading from that walk in 2022 to Friday’s ribbon cutting has had its own winding and meandering trail.

The project is largely funded through a myriad of federal and state grants, as well as American Rescue Plan Act funds available after the COVID-19 pandemic. Local, regional and state officials painstakingly went through grant applications and funding procedures to pull all of the needed streams together.

But the entire project nearly got nixed in August of 2022 when Mansfield lawmakers unanimously rejected the notion of allocating $500,000 from the city’s ARPA funding — only to change their minds at their next meeting.

The initial rejection came after lawmakers said they had insufficient information about the project’s various funding streams, including a state capital grant that had been awarded.

Then an At-large council member, Phil Scott, who was the first to oppose the proposal on Aug. 3, was one of the first to speak in favor when the issue quickly came back before lawmakers and was unanimously approved.

“Since then, I’ve got a lot more knowledge about the additional money and kind of what the plans are. Had I known then what I know now, I would not have made that motion (to pull the initial proposal),” Scott said

“I think we need to just pull the band aid off and appropriate the full $500,000 for this project,” he said at the time. “I think it’s been proven in other cities and other places that the more (connections are made between communities and bike trails), the more the development and the more people want to come here.”

Now that the connector is complete, the Richland County Park District, which operates the B&O Trail, will take over maintenance of it.

The Richland B&O Trail spans 18 miles and connects four of Richland County’s communities on its trek between North Lake Park in downtown Mansfield to the Village of Butler.

Friday’s ribbon cutting comes less than a month after the completion of a new concrete path on the south side of Millsboro Road between Trimble Road and Marion Avenue, effectively connecting the B&O Trail to the Mansfield Art Center.

The construction project creating the 10-foot wide, multi-use path had about a $750,000 price tag, all of which is coming from federal and state funds, according to Bianchi.

Bianchi said plans are in the works to improve a remaining section of the sidewalk, about eight-tenths of a mile, along Trimble as it heads toward Millsboro.

He said the city is beginning preliminary engineering on that section of work this fall with a final design completed in 2026.

“We are looking to construct that section using grant funds, most likely in 2028,” Bianchi said.

The next long-term phase in connecting the B&O Trail to downtown will be improvements along Marion Avenue from the Mansfield Art Center, an effort that Bianchi said could be years in the making as grant funding is sought and obtained.