The city of Montague’s bicycle trail will be closed in coming weeks as Rieth-Riley Construction in Ludington repaves the trail.
The repaving will span from Stanton Boulevard to the pedestrian bridge that sends the trail on to Whitehall, as well as the small area that passes by the Trailway Campground. The project will begin with preliminary work next week and is scheduled to last seven weeks. Once the full repaving portion of the project begins, the trail will be temporarily closed. At latest, the trail should reopen to the public May 24, but city manager Jeff Auch is optimistic the work will be done prior to that.
“It’s not very intensive work,” Auch said. “Once they get into the main part of the project, they’ll crush the entire bike trail and reshape it. It’ll be widened in certain sections.”
The work has been years in the making. The city has received increasing complaints, Auch said, about the state of the trail over the past few years. The state of the trail stood in stark contrast to the William Field Hart-Montague Bicycle Trail State Park, which begins at the northern end of Montague and whose trail was repaved in 2015 with funding from the state and Department of Natural Resources grants.
“There were lines that cut across and had to be patched and some other things,” Auch said. “It was not terrible, but we learned from the state that we were able to get federal funding for alternative public transportation and decided to apply for it. We were lucky to be able to get that funding for the year.”
Auch said the city originally hoped to push the repaving project to the fall to avoid closing the trail near peak season, but “things didn’t fall into place,” Auch said, so the project will be done prior to the summer.
“The state allocated a certain amount of funds, and they were trying to finalize that before the next batch of funding later this year,” Auch said. “There’s a process of going through the certifications with MDOT, filing engineering plans and going through the bid process with contractors.”
