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Katie:
In this episode, we talk with Travis, many community projects manager with the City of Redding's Community Services Department. Travis has been a key player in developing several successful grant applications with the State of California in the last few years. His work, along with others in the city, has secured millions of dollars in grant funding for our local area, parks and trails.

Steve:
We'll talk with Travis about the exciting upgrades to Caldwell Park coming in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, including the skate park currently under construction and other new amenities that will be coming soon, like a new bike park, exercise area, shade structures and more. He also answer some questions about the Panorama Park project off Lake Boulevard and when Redding residents can expect to see their brand new indoor recreation facility.

Katie:
Lastly, Travis looks back on Twenty Twenty One, which he refers to as the year the city built bridges. Some of these bridges replaced car fire damage, but several more are new additions to upgrade trails and fish viewing areas. If you haven't been out hiking, walking or biking around the city, there are a lot of new things to see.

Travis Menne:
My name is Travis Minnie, I'm the community projects manager with the city of Redding Community Services Department.

Katie:
There are tons of park projects going on. One project that started a little while ago and you can correct me on how long, but the Caldwell Park expansion project? Talk to us a little bit about that project. What's going on with it? When did it start? When is it supposed to be finished?

Travis Menne:
So the Caldwell Park expansion project is part of a big effort to bring Caldwell Park into, I guess, what we'd like to call version three. We've done a lot of improvements since the nineteen sixties, when the city acquired the property and started developing the park. Now we have some opportunity to do additional things that haven't been either thought of or fundable over the years. So our staff was able to secure a six point seven million dollars grant through California state parks and the parks bond, which was Proposition sixty eight. That specific program is a statewide park program, so it's a big initiative to fund parks in communities that have park deficient areas or low income areas. So we were able to use some income data and get a big infrastructure grant for our park. That project includes new skate park additions, a new bike park which is on the east side of Market Street. So the reason it's called the chordal park expansion is because the park is expanding across Market Street. So the river trail that runs under the bridge there, that will actually be the connection between those two, but two big premiere facilities with the bike park and skate park. We're also adding exercise equipment to Caldwell Park. We are adding an art project which is going to be super exciting to reveal along the River Trail, and I think it's going to be one of those remarkable things that people want to go check out and make some really unique place making down there.

Travis Menne:
We're actually replacing the restrooms in Caldwell Park on the East End. We are doing new parking, which has been a big problem in that park for a long time. Add new landscaping. We are also adding, I believe I mentioned the exercise equipment, which is a super cool system and actually has a phone app so you can log your progress. You can compete with other people. There are fitness courses on there. It tells you how to use it and like I said, track your progress. So it's just kind of next-level stuff and it's a system that's used in other cities. So it's called the national fitness campaign. And other cities have the same exact equipment so you can go. And if you're ever traveling or people or traveling here, they know what to expect. We're adding some shade in jump river playground, which was sorely needed for some of the kids out there. We don't have any shaded playgrounds, so this is actually going to cover that and make it more summer-friendly for the kids. And in addition to all of that, we are doing some new trail lighting and some new Sacramento River Trail Trailhead and little minor improvements. And I should mention some new courts, so yeah, it's a huge project. There's a lot going on with it and it's going to be a super exciting next couple of years in Caldwell Park.

Steve:
It sounds like there's some really neat features and expansion pieces going into this. How is it decided as to what exactly is to be built? You mentioned some of those cool things, like the expanded skate park and a new bike park and exercise equipment and others. Are there community outreach efforts that are done leading up to the construction phase or how does that process work as far as community input into deciding which pieces are done with the grant funding?

Travis Menne:
Yeah, I think, Steve, that one is an interesting one because this project specifically capitalizes on some longstanding efforts, especially with the skate park and those guys out there with skate movement and RTG, BMX and all the guys and gals that have been working on that. They've been out there for years hosting tournaments, trying to raise funds to get a concept together. And what we did with this application was take their progress and also looking at the bike park, which has been talked about for several years and find two sort of grassroots movements that we can incorporate into our application. So now we have non-profit partners who've been working on projects that we're actually able to empower them to do this stuff so they have their own separate engagement processes to get to the point where they were. But when we applied for the program, they have a requirement to do a certain number of public meetings, and we actually ended up exceeding that. So they require you to do five public meetings as a form of engagement. We ended up doing about eight public engagement meetings for the Caldwell project. And those are anything from like a park tour to walk around from workshops in the Caldwell Recreation Center. We did some surveys when we opened the pool for the year. And so it was just a big, varied approach, and we tried to get audiences from different times and different people using it for different uses. So we definitely cast a wide net with that sort of thing. And it's much like other projects where we want to hear what the public is going to use on that project. Specifically, we have the skate park and not everyone can profess to be a Tony Hawk or a skate park designer.

Travis Menne:
So knowing. What skateboarders want to use is very important, so not only do we have a designer who is an expert, but we also have our skateboarders locally who know what they're going to use. So we might think that 30 foot vertical ramp sounds like some good idea. Well, five people in town may be the audience that can use that, so we really need to make sure that we're having a broad spectrum facility that a lot of people can use because this type of capital improvement money doesn't come around all the time. So we really think about what's going to go into these parks and how they're going to be successful. And we want this skate park to be long lived and exciting every time people go to it. The rest of this stuff comes from public engagement in that project. So we're looking at adding a wall ball court. Well, the Wall Ball Court came about because we had a meeting and it came up as an idea and people started talking about it and realize that we have one smaller wall ball court, I think, in town and then a practice one, and it activates this whole area that we were having trouble figuring out what to do something with. So we're looking at, well, maybe we do some landscaping there and now we have an actual use and a whole nother user group that's right next to the skate park. So it's just good to have some synergy with these different types of activities. So you kind of need the public to take you in different directions sometimes. And maybe you come up with the idea based on their feedback or they come up with something and you find a way to help them meet that goal.

Katie:
You mentioned there are several things going in to the park and it's going to be an exciting couple of years. The skate park is currently under construction. When is that going to be finished and then when can we expect to see some of these other parts and pieces come online?

Travis Menne:
The skate park is scheduled to be completed the first quarter of twenty twenty two, so I'm anticipating March sometime. It kind of depends on the weather, which is kind of tough with the winter. Luckily, with the small concrete paws that the skate park guys can do, they're able to sort of get away with some rain and not be impacted too much. But we expect that to be open March or April. The project won't necessarily be complete at that time, but the skate park will be scalable and open. We still have lighting we need to do, and that will come later in the year. So we're thinking toward the end of 2022. We should be in construction on the larger Caldwell project, which includes skate park lighting, so there will still be some other aspects later on. The rest of that project should be breaking ground twenty twenty two and be well underway. I could foresee it going into twenty twenty three because of just the immense scope that we have out there.

Steve:
And, Travis, with regard to the bike park itself, obviously the current junior bike park gets quite a bit of use is the vision for this new bike park, more of an older child slash adult themed park or also catered towards children and kind of size and scope. Can you just talk a little bit about what the vision is for that?

Travis Menne:
The Caldwell Junior Bike Park was first off, a super awesome success, and we're definitely happy to have done that one. And it kind of proved our case that bike parks are great and families love that, and it's a great training ground. So that area will take care of a good portion of our audience that kids on Strider, kids learning how to ride and people want something a little less hectic. So we like to have that over there as sort of a training ground. Then the other bike park, the new one will be a little more progressive. So it's like three and a half jump lines. So one of them splits from hard to harder. But what the idea is there is that we have a beginner, intermediate, advanced jump line and we still keep that skills progression up. So we have the junior bike park. Hopefully, you work your way up to the big bike park. We still have a pump track, jump lines, all those sort of features, plus a skills and skills trail we would call it, which is going to simulate some mountain bike type features like creek crossings and drops and things like that that you might encounter when you're out on some trails. So it's going to have a big, varied scope, but the whole goal is to work you up to become a better, more confident rider.

Katie:
And you said this is a six point seven million dollars grant project that was funded through Prop sixty eight. Is the city contributing any funds to this project and as a taxpayer or taxpayers contributing to this expansion?

Travis Menne:
So yeah, the project is funded through the Parks Bond, which is State Bond initiative. So as California state residents, we will all contribute to that bond measure. But the project specifically is being paid for by that. The city did have some upfront money where we paid for studies and the sequoia process. So environmental process that we have to do to apply for the grant that came out of our Park Development Fund, which is essentially driven by park development impact fees. So those development impact fees come with new development in town like commercial structures, residential structures that essentially are paying for our park system to have improvements or additional capacity into it. So that's how we see like a lot of new neighborhood parks, the development around there generates a certain fee amount and that fee amount goes toward the park or it goes toward the fund. And in this case, we were able to use that fund to help us secure the grant by funding the environmental process ahead of time.

Steve:
What do you say to folks who say that before we should put money in resources and energy into revamping and enhancing current parks, we need to deal with the homelessness crisis that's in our area or public safety.

Travis Menne:
What I say is that one time capital improvement monies for parks aren't always readily available. So as the city, we're going to take advantage of that when it comes up because prop. sixty eight passed, there's a huge pot of money out there and we have to be very aggressive and go after that as much as possible and as much as our ideas allow for. So I think what we need to understand about Grant specifically is that grants don't exist for the entity who applies for them to just do whatever. So there's always a string attached. In this case, the strings are good. They want you to have this park open and accessible for everyone. They want you to maintain it. They want you to keep it for some certain period of time. Keep those improvements up. We can't then go use that money for a different purpose. We can't use it to fund police officer positions. We can't use it to fund programs for unhoused individuals, and it's funding for the purpose of the program that doesn't necessarily exclude doing things that are helpful in other ways. So one of the main goals of our project here is to design safety into our new features to be able to have good lighting, good sightlines. There's a lot of design principles behind that. There's a lot of science behind that, not only how you maintain a site, but how you plant your trees, what kind of shrubs you use and what I what I do want to say to a lot of folks that say, maybe we do have a problem or we shouldn't be putting money into parks so that our parks are great. I go down to parks all the time. We have staff and parks. They're just great places to be and improving those spaces is going to be better for everyone. I think overall, having better, more well utilized parks full of people, it's certainly not going to hurt

Steve:
Travis if we shift our attention a bit further west and other exciting projects on the horizon that was just awarded recently is for Panorama Park out on Lake Boulevard. Talk to us a little bit about that. What the vision is for Panorama Park?

Travis Menne:
Yeah, definitely. The Panorama Park project is just going to be so rewarding, I'm so happy to have been part of that. The city acquired that property in 2006. As a youngster, I grew up over there and that field's been empty forever. So we've got some property right by what used to be Buckeye Middle School. It's Rocky Point Charter School and big shout out to them for helping out with our public engagement process. On that, we actually applied for the same program as Caldwell using that same funding source. So it's a statewide park program and we applied for eight and a half million dollars to get a big park and community center and playground fields. All that stuff up in that area and actually a dog park, which has excited a lot of people and we just heard about two weeks ago that we were awarded and it's going to be premier facilities. It's going to be very big structure, two basketball courts, indoor recreation classes. So this is going to be our first city controlled gym space, which means that we can house our programs in one spot, which is just great to be able to provide, just be able to have a stable home base for that stuff that allows us to do so much more. We just think it's going to be awesome.

Steve:
And Travis, what is the estimated completion date of the Panorama Park project? I'm guessing we're still a little ways off from that. But what is the current date?

Travis Menne:
These projects take a long time. We have all our environmental done, but the design process is going to take about a year. By the time we get everything, we have to go out with a request for proposals for people to design it. So we've got an architect, engineer, landscape architect, all that sort of stuff. And then after that, we've got to go out to bid and it could be a couple of years from now. It could be into twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four. And the absolute max date that we have to complete this project is June twenty twenty five, but we're already working on the next step before we're required to because we want it to go as fast as possible. If I can cut out a month now, that's one more month. I get on the back end where that facility is open and helping people. So we are constantly finding ways to get efficiency up front and during the project so that we can deliver more quickly.

Steve:
And for those community members who want information on the Panorama Park project, they can go to City of inaugural Panorama Park and we'll link to that. The show notes as well to see some proposed renderings and read more about the grant process to get some project information. So Travis switching gears again, there's also a series of bridges in and around and adjacent to the River Trail, some of which were damaged during the Carr Fire. Can you talk to us a little bit about bridge replacement process and what that looks like, what exactly it is, where it is and how that piece of it works?

Travis Menne:
Twenty twenty one was our year of building bridges, that's for sure. The Carr Fire did us no favors with everything that we lost to go see our infrastructure of bridges and trails just have such damage that was really hard to come back from. Luckily, through FEMA funding and Callaway, yes, there's some repair funds for these projects, and we were able to redo the bridges along the Sacramento River Trail. And those have been done for a while now. But those are very tough because they have some historic abutments and we had to do some studies and not everything is just quite as easy as go put another bridge on it. So same thing happened with the point of Ventura Trail, which is just wrapped up now. We were able to put some temporary bridges out for a while, but we always knew that we'd have this upcoming project to replace them, and we're actually able to do some system hardening. If you call it where we do concrete and steel structure rather than a wood bridge. So we have a better product out there that's more robust. Hopefully, we don't have another incident like that, but if we did, we'd have a lot better shot at retaining those bridges. And we actually have done some other new projects like the Lower Salt Creek Trail had a bridge put in, and that was a super exciting one that we did, I think, in May this year. So we work for the Redding Trail Alliance to reroute the Salt Creek Trail and put in a new section and actually install the flame resistant fiberglass bridge. And we used a helicopter to do it, which is really unique. And if anyone hasn't gone down there, I would totally encourage them to do that, especially now when things are turning green and there's water in there, certain times of year you can see salmon coming up through there. That's a super exciting corridor.

Steve:
Where do you Access to Salt Creek Trail from?

Travis Menne:
There is a trailhead on two ninety nine, which is just outside of town, so it'd be passed by Ventura. And if you go maybe like a mile out, there's a trailhead on the left should be on the south side and then kind of cross the road. But there's a better way to go if you're on for a little longer journey. You can come from the Middle Creek Trail area along the Sacramento River Trail, so you can either come from Keswick or the Diesel Horse Bridge parking lot and go up and get on the trail from there. So it's right at the junction of the Middle Creek Trail with the Sacramento River Trail, which you don't know what the Middle Creek Trail is. There's one more paved trail that comes off the south side of the river heads toward Old Shasta. It's that one right there. And then two more exciting bridge projects was the Nur Pon open space, which received new fish channels. So there's a lot of improvement going on out there, and that project is coming to fruition. So we're doing a lot of improvements and we hope to bring that back to the public next year some time. But it's got two brand new bridges and they crossed. Over that channel, and it's probably one of the best views you can get in town. Be right over the river. I mean, when the salmon come through there, you'll be able to see fish and access that waterfront. So it's just super unique. Nothing like it in the city. And then another one that we did was a northeast crossing trail, which has a bridge that's very similar looking to the Nur Pon ones. And so it looks like a very themed approach there. But that bridge crosses over Boulder Creek, and although we did not get to use a helicopter, it was pretty cool to put that one in as well. So I'm all for prefab bridges because we can just kind of get them together and put them in and get people where they want to go. So that was another great project that we were able to do this year.

Steve:
Travis, are there any other upcoming projects or things that we haven't touched on yet today that you want to ensure that the community is aware of?

Travis Menne:
Yeah, we are starting on the Canyon Hollow Trail project really soon, which is funded by Proposition Sixty Eight Grant through the California Conservation Corps. So they'll actually be doing the work on our behalf for building about three miles of dirt single track trail. So that's walking, hiking, mountain bike riding, and that's going to go along the Canyon Creek area. So it's going to connect up to country heights. It's going to connect through proposed neighborhood that hopefully be built soon called West Ridge, and it'll connect over toward Boston and Placer. And we actually have two waterfalls we're going to be able to include in that. So it's going to be another super unique spot. You just can't engineer your way into a waterfall like that. Like you have to live in Redding to get that

Katie:
Just as a reminder for everyone. Be sure to follow the City of Redding's social media channels and subscribe to the City of Reading newsletter for the latest updates and info on these parks and trail projects in Redding. You can also follow Redding Trail Alliance as they regularly post about these things happening on the Redding area trails. All of these links will be available in the show notes.

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