In Monte Vista, Gigi Dennis, the city manager, and DJ Enderle, the city planner, are on a walking tour of Lariat Ditch. Along are Chris Perkins, vice president of programs for the influential Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, and SLV GO! Executive Director Mick Daniel with members of his team.
It’s an educational walk for Perkins, who Monte Vista and SLV GO! invited along with hopes of gaining the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable’s support for a project that would see the city and the Lariat Ditch Company pipe the ditch and then build a multi-modal trail atop the length of the ditch, which is nearly 2 miles.
There’s a window of opportunity that Monte Vista and SLV GO! are trying to slip through to apply for funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Community Change Grants Program. The deadline to apply for some of the $2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money the EPA is awarding to community projects is in November.
Monte Vista is working fast to line up letters of recommendation to support its request for $12.9 million, which Enderle says will allow the city to install 11,200 feet of concrete reinforced pipe and then a trail placed on top “for multimodal transportation as well as safe transit across the city.”
“The idea behind this project is to reduce the water loss and also improve water quality delivered to ag users,” Enderle told members of the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable this week in gaining its support for the project.
A trail atop the covered ditch for recreating is 21st-century thinking.
The Outdoor Recreation Roundtable is headquartered in Washington D.C. and carries significant weight in advocating for the outdoor recreation industry and for inclusion of outdoor recreation as an economic spoke for rural communities like Monte Vista. Last November it awarded Monte Vista $10,000 to help with its outdoor recreation planning.
Perkins traveled in from Wyoming to see the project, ask his own questions and engage Dennis, Enderle and other town leaders on the value of building an outdoor recreation strategy.
“The opportunity on one hand is to help improve public health, to help connect people multigenerational to their loved ones and to help revitalize rural communities,” Perkins told a gathering at The Pivot Public House following the Lariat Ditch tour.
“The other opportunity we have is to get ahead of some of the challenges facing rural communities, particularly around housing and affordability, rural gentrification, stewardship, human-wildlife interaction.
“I think if we’re proactive about some of those things and we find solutions early, we can get ahead. So that’s another part of my interest is to figure out what communities are doing to both improve the community but also to prevent longtime residents from having to move away.”
In Monte Vista it means capitalizing upon the significant amount of federal and state tax dollars being directed at outdoor recreation to build on Monte Vista’s offerings to its residents. Both Dennis, who talks about being in the sunset of her public service career, and Enderle, who she hired nearly two years ago to push in these areas, are determined to improve the quality of life for residents through projects like Lariat Ditch.
In September of last year Monte Vista was among 400 communities that received $1 million through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to plant 100 trees annually for five years. It’s that type of greening of Monte Vista, along with a new emphasis on water conservation, that Dennis and Enderle measure as progress.
“Monte Vista is a beautiful community. We have some beautiful boulevards that are covered by trees. You have bluegrass lawns, you have a lot of things that are water-intensive. We have Russian Olives running all over the place,” Enderle said at the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable meeting.
“So we have all these water-intensive things that probably don’t belong there, but we don’t want to change the character of the city. So how do we smartly change from what people have done for decades and decades and not take away that character that we have but move into a more intelligent way of growth?”
One answer is the Lariat Ditch project, which solves an issue of water seepage while creating a new multimodal trail for recreation and transit.
“Outdoor Recreation Roundtable supports the local champions in Monte Vista who are willing to invest in their current infrastructure to ensure future residents have walkable areas and clean water, and applauds the cross-collaboration of partnerships and promotion of multiple benefits within the same corridor,” Perkins wrote in his letter of support.