In this captivating episode of the Inspiring Good Podcast, hosts Marshall King and Kevin Deary engage Brittany Short in a stimulating discussion on creating, expanding, and transforming communities in Elkhart County via trails and pathways. Brittany Short, a trail advocate and principal player in the local Connect initiative and Pumpkinvine Cyclery, shares her inspiring journey of advocating and implementing trail systems that have significantly enriched Elkhart County.
Delving into the importance of trails in community development, Brittany's passion and dedication shine through as the trio discuss the relevance of trails not just as recreational routes, but as vital components of community infrastructure. They highlight how the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail epitomizes the community's commitment to health, environmental sustainability, and strengthening the social fabric. Join us to explore the triumphs, challenges, and transformative potential of trail planning.
00:20:09: Overview of Trail Usage in Elkhart County
00:22:03: Importance of Trails in Communities
00:23:03: Fundraising for Trails
00:24:09: Expansion of Trails to the West
00:25:19: Connecting Napanee and Wakarusa by Trails
00:26:23: Discussing the trail project
00:27:31: The project's celebration
00:28:12: Upcoming celebration events
00:28:52: Trail maintenance responsibilities
00:30:02: Rethinking trails as transportation corridors
00:31:30: Future of community with trail expansion
00:33:28: The hope for more trail connectivity
00:34:13: The power of partnerships
00:34:50: Outro and acknowledgments
This show is a production of the Community Foundation of Elkhart County. It is powered by equipment from Sweetwater and recorded in the Viaggio Studio at weIMPACT in Elkhart's River District. Editing is done by the award-winning communication students at Goshen College, home of one of the best college radio stations in the nation. Listen to Globe Radio at 91.1 FM. Learn more about the Community Foundation of Elkhart County at inspiringgood.org You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Music is provided by Sensational Sounds. Thanks for listening. We hope you are inspired and inspire good and your community.
Marshall King:
Others as part of his role at the Community foundation. Today, our guest is Brittany Short, director of Connect and Elkhart County, an initiative of the Community Foundation to build and connect trails and pathways in our community. Brittany is also co-owner of Pumpkinvine Cyclery and has a long history of supporting the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail and other pathways in our community. Brittany, welcome to the podcast. We're delighted to have you here.
Brittany Short:
Thanks so much for having me.
Kevin Deary:
Brittany, it is so good to have you here. We have a lot to talk about, especially about active transportation. That was a term I learned from you, and I've learned from my research of you. And let's talk a little bit about your role here at the community foundation. And also, what was the genesis?
Kevin Deary:
How did that start?
Brittany Short:
So my role at the Community foundation is an initiative director. So the place making committee of the foundation really just decided in partnership with the community that trails were an incredibly important part of quality of life here. And two years ago, I started my position after moving on from the friends of the Pumpkin vine presidential role on the board of directors.
Kevin Deary:
And how many miles were already before you started this initiative here? How many miles were already on the ground? How many pathways?
Brittany Short:
So before I started, the count was 68 miles of trail. And typically you can count on a trail, a mile of trail, taking about five years to plan. So this is a long game here. We're really looking to, to build about 130 miles total. So we've got a lot of work to do ahead of us, but the future is bright.
Kevin Deary:
What's some of the work that goes into and also the cost per mile? But what's some of the work in the planning of a trail?
Brittany Short:
Oh, man. Where to start? There's a lot of work that goes into planning a trail. First off, community conversation. So you're talking with neighbors, you're talking with the municipality that it will affect highway departments, a lot of our, you know, Nipsco or just public utilities.
Brittany Short:
There's just so many partners and stakeholders involved that those conversations can take years to all happen. And make sure that you're all on the same page. And then after you have those conversations and you've got a route, there's fundraising to do. You've got to figure out how you're going to pay for it and then how you're going to maintain it long term. So lots of work that's involved in building trails.
Marshall King:
So this is now the work that you're doing at the community foundation to kind of build this coalition in order to build more trails, right?
Brittany Short:
Correct.
Marshall King:
And the role at the community foundation is somewhat unique because talk about how connect and Elkhart County was created by the community foundation, and then you entered this role as its leader.
Brittany Short:
So the way that connect and Elkhart County was kind of spun up was through the place making committee, which is one of three granting committees at the foundation. And they took a look at all of the master plans around Elkhart County and determined that, really determined which ones had trail plans in them. So for those of you who may not know what a community master plan looks like, typically you'll have community voices involved. So there'll be public meetings about what the residents of that community want to see. And then a consultant will put all of these things together.
Brittany Short:
Sometimes it will be, you know, you need improvements to roads, sometimes it might be park ideas. But almost all of the of Elkhart County's community plans included a trail, at least one in each of these plans. And I believe there were about 20 that the consultant took a look at. And what they did was compiled all of those trail plans and put it into one county master plan. And that really has been my job, is to make sure that those pieces of those plans are executed on, on behalf of the residents of those communities.
Kevin Deary:
And do some move quicker than others? Of course, parts of the plan, and then that's how you prioritize.
Brittany Short:
So, yes, different parts of the plan move faster. I would say the community conversations and developing routes tends to be the longest and most difficult part of trail building. Fundraising then has its own challenges. But typically, once you have determined what route is going to be used, the rest of it kind of falls in place. It doesn't mean it goes quickly, but it ends up falling in place.
Marshall King:
So just for some background, can you give a short history? It would be a short history of trail making and active transportation in Elkhart County. I think the Mill Race Canal Trail was one of the first alongside the Pumpkinvine. I think some of those were happening at the same time. But, like, talk about some of the history in our community of how we've done this.
Brittany Short:
To my understanding, some of the first trail planning conversations started in, like, the late seventies with Elkhart County Parks master plan. And there was some conversation at the time they knew that this pumpkin vine railroad was going to be discontinued and that other communities around the country were using those rail beds as multi use trails. And so that was included in their, I think, 1979 master plan. And then there were other conversations that happened across the county. And in 1989, in December, there was a group of five gentlemen who got together and said, we would really like to see this pumpkin vine thing come to life.
Brittany Short:
And they spent the next ten years working in partnership with the municipalities and the parks departments to buy and purchase that rail bed and really make what we know as the pumpkin vine nature trail today. But they took almost ten full years before that first mile, 1.75 miles of trail were built in Goshen. Just lots and lots of planning. And in those early days, there was not community support.
Marshall King:
I was a newspaper reporter, and remember what the opponents of the Pumpkinvine were. Were saying some of them were prominent people and even had positions of governmental power, and they just happened to be landowners adjacent to some of this. And then. But there was that opposition. But often that opposition then shifts and becomes support.
Brittany Short:
That has been the story for us. Yeah. You know, there was a lot of fear in the early days about what this would mean. And there was going to be people in. In.
Brittany Short:
Near people's backyards. They were used to privacy and lived in the country, a lot of them, for a reason or for many decades. And it was difficult to imagine what it could look like for people to be traversing by bike or on foot nearby their properties. So there's. Yeah, there's fear of crime going up or people getting hurt, and that just did not prove to be true.
Brittany Short:
And over time, a lot of those same officials that were incredibly oppositional to the project to begin with came around and are some of today's big proponents.
Kevin Deary:
I was. My wife and I have liked to. We've done the Pumpkinvine from Middlebury to Shipshawana and back again. I don't know how many miles it is. It feels like 100 miles to this old guy.
Kevin Deary:
My wife seems to do it pretty easily, but I was surprised at the amount of Amish that used a bike pass. Were you surprised by how many Amish are on that, particularly on a Sunday afternoon?
Brittany Short:
I'm not surprised, but I think, yeah, a lot of people were people. Amish folks will go out of their way to use the pumpkin vine because it's a safe place for them to move. They don't have that same privilege that we do. Traversing roads with our cars safety is a real concern. And there were, I would say, gosh, early 2010s, there were a couple of deaths that shook that community, and there was a shift in the way that they see trails and the way that they behave on the roads.
Brittany Short:
And it's really. I think it's been a gift to that community. They've actually invested quite a lot from their churches into making certain sections of the pumpkin vine possible.
Marshall King:
I live at the south end of the mill race canal trail, and I see the groups of Amish, I call them Amish bike gangs. I see these families, these large family groups, show up at the Goshendam, having ridden from Middlebury or Shipshewana or somewhere along the line. And it's a remarkable thing to see, and it's a joyful thing to see in our community. You happen. I mean, you were on the Pumpkinvine board, but your journey, so to speak, with the Pumpkinvine starts well before that, with the business that you started with your husband.
Marshall King:
Talk a little bit about Pumpkinvine Cyclery, if you would.
Brittany Short:
Yeah. So my husband and I graduated from Goshen College back in early 2011, and that was when, well, we were in the middle of a great recession, and there were limited jobs in Elkhart County. We started looking, really all over the country to figure out where we were gonna move. We had no idea that we would be staying here long term. It's where both of us grew up, and we always thought we would leave for at least a little while.
Brittany Short:
But just based on the way things were going in our community and in the country, we decided that we were gonna have to make our own way. And so we started the shop in 2011, and that was just as the pumpkin vine was being finished. It wasn't. I think it actually got finished in 2012, but it was just getting finished in Middlebury. And it really is kind of what allowed us to stay to be near our family.
Brittany Short:
And, you know, I could go into a longer story about how the same week that we decided we were going to start the shop, we found out that we were pregnant with our first born, and everything just really fell into place. And I know he and I both feel a debt of gratitude to the pumpkin vine because it gave us our family's business, it's provided for us over the years, and allowed us to stay close to our parents and raise our children.
Kevin Deary:
That sense of family is really important. By the way, at Goshen College, who is your favorite professor?
Brittany Short:
Kevin Deary.
Kevin Deary:
Oh, just that I threw out there. And she was a 4.0 student, so she was. She's brilliant. Sorry for that little mini commercial there. I want to talk a little about best practices.
Kevin Deary:
You went from serving as the board president and being on the board, and now you develop boards and committees. You develop and you're working with a board, multiple boards, multiple groups of people. How does it feel to be on the side of the fence? What are some of the best practices that you're learning now that you have to fuel all these groups.
Brittany Short:
Oh, man. Building trust is incredibly important. And in building trust, integrity is just critical. If you know your values and you abide by them, things end up falling into place a bit. That doesn't mean it's gonna be easy.
Brittany Short:
But building trust, building relationships, I think, has been critical in developing committees, functional and thriving committees and boards over the course of the last, I guess, almost ten years that I've been involved in those sorts of things. You know, I find that finding folks with passion for your mission is also critical. You need to have people who are invested not just for an hour a week or, sorry, an hour a month at a board meeting. They need to be thinking about these things more frequently and becoming partners in problem solving out in the community. We have some wonderful people who are serving on the Pumpkinvine board currently, who are serving in capacities here at the foundation that clear hurdles for the community and for myself all the time, just in their daily roles and with their influence.
Kevin Deary:
And you have to work with state, because if they cross over a state road, you have to work with city, townships, smaller communities. That's got to be very complex because they seem to all have different rules. And how do you wrap all that up for Elkhart county to be able to lay some really important bike trails?
Brittany Short:
We have incredible staff at all of our different municipalities at the county. They, I don't know half of what they know about working with enDot or about engineering or just name it. It's all about partnerships and again, building those relationships. If I need to, or if I have a question relating to a county road, the first person I'm going to call is Charlie McKenzie at Elkhart County Highway. He has been a wonderful partner in getting some of these projects done.
Brittany Short:
Or if you've got a redevelopment question. Natasha Kauffman, the redevelopment commission for Elkhart county we work together so well. It's not about really one person or one committee who has all the answers. It's about knowing who to reach out to to get those answers and them being willing to partner with you back.
Kevin Deary:
What is the cost per mile? Or does? Maybe there's other variables that decide the cost, but what would it cost for 1 mile of bike trail?
Brittany Short:
Typically, we say it's about a million dollars a mile. That can vary widely. If you're going through wetlands, you might be at 1.7. If you are, if you already have the property and the rail bed is already quite smooth, you might be as low as 800,000. But it's quite expensive to do.
Brittany Short:
There are many roads. I mean, there's excavation and paving and engineering costs, all sorts of things that go into making these safe and sustainable into the future.
Kevin Deary:
And you have to purchase the land from a farmer or from a.
Brittany Short:
Usually, yes. Yep.
Kevin Deary:
And that can vary, whatever that is.
Brittany Short:
Wildly, yeah.
Kevin Deary:
And they have a chance to help route it, make a choice of how it cuts through their farm.
Brittany Short:
We really have, over the years, made a commitment to, in general, not split operations. So regardless of whether the railroad went straight through your property and didn't care that you own land on the other side, we do. And so we'll work hand in hand with that property owner to make sure that they can still function and operate well, and we'll be able to sell that property well into the future. That is incredibly important to us.
Kevin Deary:
So you and your whole family are cyclists. You guys are very active in that active transportation form. Tell me about what's a daily or a weekend look like with your family when you're out on the trails, where do you go?
Brittany Short:
Well, we are fortunate, and we live within, like, a half mile of the Pumpkinvine in Middlebury. So oftentimes, you know, lately, there's been less cycling on my end and much more walking the dogs. So the kids and I will run on down to Kreider Garden and take the dogs for a walk and come on back. My husband Spencer, just is. He would be what you call an avid cyclist, and he's on the pumpkin vinegar at least three to five times a week.
Brittany Short:
We just. It's such an asset. I can't even imagine, honestly living somewhere else where we didn't have access to the trails that we do now. I feel spoiled, but that's kind of the goal with this connect and Elkhart County thing, is to give everyone the chance to be able to enjoy their communities the way that we get to enjoy our community.
Marshall King:
Brittany, you talked about the gift that the Pumpkinvine has been to your family, and Kevin asked specifically your family's use of the trail. But what's happening? You would have some statistics related to trail counts. You certainly have anecdotal experiences from running a bike shop along this trail in terms of the tourist attraction that it's been. Talk a little bit about overall usage of what is our county's most popular trail.
Brittany Short:
So we've worked with Macog, which is Michiana Area Council of Governments, and they have an arm that really focuses on transportation by bikes and on foot. And they installed trail usage counters along the Pumpkinvine back in 2020. We found out that there are almost 300,000 passes on those counters, which is.
Marshall King:
Huge in a year.
Brittany Short:
In a year? Yeah, every single year. And that rivals some of the monon trails counts down in Indianapolis and Carmel. These trails are being used. And, you know, anecdotally, when I was at the shop regularly, we would have people come in from, gosh, we had tour groups from Australia.
Brittany Short:
We had folks who were coming regionally. I mean, we draw from Kalamazoo and Fort Wayne and Chicago regularly, but we also see daily those daily users in our community who are making lifestyle changes for themselves. I can think of half a dozen people that I know personally who have lowered their cholesterol, lowered their blood pressure just by getting on a bike or walking on the pumpkin vine regularly. No gym membership needed. It's low cost, and it's, you know, I don't want to oversell here, but it's changing people's lives.
Brittany Short:
Truly, these trails mean something to the people who live close to them and even those who are coming from far away.
Kevin Deary:
When you said you had counters on the trail, does that include walkers, or is that just a bike running over it?
Brittany Short:
So, yeah, the cool thing about these particular counters is that they're able to distinguish between a cyclist and a walker. And in general, some sections have slightly different ratios for walkers versus cyclists. But generally, we're looking at like a 60 40 split. It could be 30 70 in some areas, but the higher number being cyclists, it is really because it's a long stretch. Cyclists really love to use our trails.
Kevin Deary:
You talked about fundraising revenue generation. What is your annual budget? And then also, how do you raise money? Through grants or donations.
Brittany Short:
Wow. It's kind of, you know, our fundraising strategy is all of the above. The Friends of the Pumpkinvine Nature Trail has about 230 active members every single year. That means that they're giving more than $30 to the organization, and that adds up annually to maybe $130,000. So it's not an insignificant amount.
Brittany Short:
We also have funds dedicated from the place making committee here at the foundation that are actively being invested in trail projects. And then we work with state and federal money to bring in construction dollars. And right now, because of the bills that have recently passed out of COVID there's, like, an unprecedented amount of federal funding available for trails and active transportation. So in the next couple of years, we're really trying to take advantage of that and make sure that Elkhart County gets its fairish, a piece of the pie.
Kevin Deary:
When you look at the Pumpkinvine on a map, it's very east centric. So there's a lot over Goshen and up to Middlebury. But what's the plans moving to the west?
Brittany Short:
We're actively working on a feasibility study that would connect Elkhart to Mishawaka. And that's something in collaboration with Macagog, who I mentioned earlier, that project, if you're familiar with the pumpkin vine, you can go from Shipshewana to Middlebury to Goshen, connect to the Maple Heart Trail, which runs along Norfolk Southern's rail line, and it will get you all the way to Prairie street in Elkhart, and then it just stops. So the goal is to continue from Prairie street and get you to downtown Mishawaka. There's a couple of different route options that are being explored, but we're actively working on that and hope that in the next three years you're gonna see some form of construction starting.
Marshall King:
And then to the south, there's some talk as well about a trail connecting Nappanee and Wakarusa. Correct?
Brittany Short:
Correct. We are also actively working on what we're calling the non motorized connection study between Wakarusa and Nappanee. And the interesting thing about that study is that we're talking about including buggies in the mix here, because, again, our amish neighbors don't have a lot of safe routes to get in between those two communities. And if we can make a connection that includes them that is thought thoughtful about the way that horses and bikes and walkers might interact, that's what we're going to do. So on June 25, there is a community workshop that will be taking place at the Nappanee Public Library, where we're going to get input from the residents and try to understand, really what the community wants and needs out of that connection.
Marshall King:
And with. So we're at a key point with the pumpkin vine in terms of the last section of trail was completed last fall. Talk a little bit about that and then how you're going to celebrate that just in front of us.
Brittany Short:
Yeah, really, this last segment of trail has been a long time coming, and I think a lot of folks who served on the Pumpkinvine board would tell you that they weren't sure if it was ever going to get done. It was a really tricky section for a couple of reasons. We didn't have a very key piece of property that was needed, and also we were dealing with wetlands. And anybody who has tried to construct anything in or around a wetland understands that that process can take years. It takes a lot of people approving those permits.
Brittany Short:
And, yeah, it took me and the committee six years to work through those issues. And finally, last September, the final section opened, so we have 17 of uninterrupted miles available to users. And so because that project took from 1990, at the end of 1989 until 2023 to finish, we think it deserves a celebration. And so we're this June, from June 7 through the 15th, we're doing a series of events that will honor the work that has been done over three plus decades. And it's going to kick off with Goshen downtown, where everything started on first Fridays on June 7.
Brittany Short:
And we'll have the student steel wheels performing a free concert in the middle of downtown, which I'm incredibly excited about. And then on Tuesday, June 11, we're going to have a celebration dinner. And then, of course, we have our annual Pumpkinvine bike ride on the 15th and the night before. If anyone's interested, I would highly recommend that you participate in the threshers dinner ride. The seating is limited, so you gotta get your tickets while they're available, but you get to have a really special meal in an amish household after about a ten mile ride.
Kevin Deary:
Last question I have for you is you talked about maintenance of the trail, which is really important because there's trash along the way in some of the trails. There's work to be done to make sure it doesn't get overgrown with grass or corn or whatever else may be growing out there. But can you talk about who owns the maintenance? And that must be pretty costly, and that's part of who pays for that. Is that a county or township or.
Brittany Short:
The way that our trails have been structured? So, for the pumpkin vine, specifically, the Friends of the Pumpkinvine, a private organization, would purchase the land, get everything ready for construction, and then hand it over to a public partner. So a governmental agency, the duty of maintenance falls on those organizations. We have four managing organizations just on the pumpkin vine, and then we've got the Maple Heart Trail and River Greenway, which is the city of Elkhart. It does get quite costly.
Brittany Short:
And in general, trails and pathways are not thought of as transportation. They're really thought of and have historically been thought of as linear parks. And so funding is really low. We're really trying to solve that problem. Number one, we need to switch the mindset, a bit of folks who are making funding decisions to really think about trails as transportation corridors instead of just recreation.
Brittany Short:
There's always going to be people who get on them for fun and are using them for exercise. But there is a good chunk of our community that does not have access to vehicles. I think there was a study done, gosh, last year by a class at Notre Dame that said that in the city of Elkhart, there's about 25% of households who have access to. Who don't have access to a car regularly. So we need to start thinking about the residents who need to get other places to get places through other means of transportation.
Brittany Short:
And in doing so, we unlock other funding sources from, you know, state funding and Indiana Department of Transportation, and then federal highway dollars. I think, you know, that's really the route we're going to end up going. But in the short term, there's just a lot of budget crunching, there's a lot of volunteer hours spent, and it all works. It's just. It makes it more difficult.
Marshall King:
So, Brittany, looking ahead, as these trails get built, as we connect some of these trails, if we live in a community with 130 miles of trail, what does that look like?
Brittany Short:
It looks like people being able to move about their communities in whatever way that they choose. It looks like folks understanding their communities at a much more molecular level. You know, I think back, and I wasn't there but 100 or 75 years ago, the way that we moved around our communities was entirely different. It wasn't really until the 1940s that we even understood what a highway was. It was normal for people to cycle around their communities, to go get groceries on a bicycle, and there was just a different sense of community at that point.
Brittany Short:
I always say that I think the automobile was the very first avatar. Like, you kind of get to go around your community and not really engage in a real way. You're just going from point a to point, baby. Our community will look different when we've built double the amount of trails that we have now. And I'm excited.
Brittany Short:
I'm excited for what that will look like. And honestly, I think we can imagine past 130 miles, because people are going to want to connect to their school or their subdivision or their doctor's office. Yeah, I'm excited for the future.
Marshall King:
And what along those lines? What gives you hope?
Brittany Short:
The partnership that we have been able to build with our public partners. I think when the Pumpkinvine first started and the public backlash really became kind of crippling the feeling of the public not supporting this project, those visionaries, I don't know that it would be easy for them at that time to envision the way that we've come full circle today. We've got county commissioners, we have councilmen and women and staff in our government agencies who are really thinking about what it means to be a resident in a community and thinking about quality of place and quality of community and trails really kind of make those community connections for everyone. So partnerships, partnerships are what give me hope.
Marshall King:
Thank you so much for being with us today. It's been a delight to have you.
Brittany Short:
Thank you.
Marshall King:
The show is a production of the Community Foundation of Elkhart County. It is powered by equipment from Sweetwater and recorded in the Viaggio Studio at weIMPACT in Elkhart's river district. Music is provided by Sensational Sounds. Editing is done by the award-winning communication students at Goshen College, home of one of the best college radio stations in the nation. Listen to Globe radio at 91.1 fm or online.
Marshall King:
Learn more about the Community Foundation of Elkhart County@inspiringgood.org. you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. We hope you're inspired and inspire good in your community.
