After a special meeting, a trail in Santa Claus is still out for bid.
The Santa Claus Town Council held a special town council meeting on Monday night.
In the meeting, the council approved the Spencer County Mitigation Plan, as well as discussing the future of the Eastside Trail in the town.
The town rose over a quarter of a million dollars for the project over the course of a few years. Santa Claus Town Council President Michael Johannes says that they took that to INDOT to apply for the trial project.
“So we sent out a request through in that two construction people to say, “Okay, we’re ready to build this. Give us your best bid.” That’s called letting. And then we got it back and I got it back. And then they sent it back to us and it was $418,000 over what are engineering estimates were, but our engineering estimates were from five years ago. ”
Prices have gone up since estimates were made, which was over 5 years ago. So now the council has to make a decision. They could drop the project altogether and pay back $250,000 INDOT had put into the project or they could pay the remaining $418,000, but that was never budgeted for. Luckily, there was a way Santa Claus could come up with the funds.
“You go back to INDOT and most of the time they’ll say ‘you just have to drop it. If you’re not going to pay for it and it goes back, then you’ll have to come up with a quarter of a million’, that type of stuff.”
He continues by saying “But any project that they do if they have 10 million dollars worth of money to put out for trail projects if somebody drops one of those projects, that money goes back into the pool.”
When Johannes called, there was money in the pool that could be used. However, if Santa Claus got more funds, it would need to be paid through an 80/20 split, with the town paying 20% of whatever they are getting from INDOT.
Now that that’s the plan, the council moved to rebid the project again to get it done.
Johannes says that a trail like this will be good for local property values and more.
“There are a lot of success stories where the communities along the trails and this is when it passes through multiple communities that a lot of small businesses open because of the trails that would never been opened before”
Johannes hopes that the eastside trail can connect to trails in Lincoln State Park and the National Boyhood.
