The Covington City Commission passed over voting on a proposed 10-year agreement with Tri-State Trails, a regional advocacy group that aims to improve biking and trail infrastructure, at their meeting on Tuesday.
“In order to ensure that everybody understands all the nuances and complexities of the plan, [Wade Johnston, the executive director of Tri-State Trails] agreed to a session for the commissioners that would be interested,” Covington Mayor Joe Meyer said.
Meyer added that they will probably meet in the next six weeks or so, and the meeting may also involve some Newport city commissioners, as the plan is a joint plan for both cities.
Johnston did not attend the meeting but confirmed with LINK nky that the commissioners still needed to hash out the details of the plan before moving forward.
Tri-State Trails presented its plan to the commission in January, and the commission discussed it at the caucus meeting last week. The plan surveyed the existing bike infrastructure in the city and offered ideas to make changes. A similar proposal has been presented for Newport, and the joint plan would also connect the biking infrastructure between the two cities.
In addition to infrastructural recommendations, the plan recommends some policy and operational changes to create a more bike-friendly city overall. These include making a dedicated line item for bike infrastructure in the city budget, expanding the public bike share program, creating dedicated detours for cyclists to circumvent construction projects and road closures as well as generally expanding education and advocacy for cycling, among other measures.
There wasn’t much discussion on Tuesday, but both the commissioners and the mayor expressed some trepidation about the plan’s recommendations last week.
Even City Manager Ken Smith admitted that it would be difficult to implement everything in the plan, even though the plan was first and foremost a list of recommendations, not mandates.
“It would be totally impractical to over a 10-year period to do everything that’s in there,” Smith said last week, especially since funding for the changes isn’t yet guaranteed (The Devou Good Foundation provided the funding for the plan study itself).
Meyer seemed to share his concern.
“This is a good plan. It’s very very comprehensive and identifies a lot of issue issues,” Meyer said last week. “My questions have to do with the city’s capacity to commit to implementation.”
Meyer pointed out that many of the infrastructural plans were contingent on getting funding, for one. Moreover, he also pointed to other, less costly policy recommendations, such as the infrastructure budget ear mark as well as various new rules governing bike traffic and availability in the city. He said he wasn’t familiar with a lot of the recommended policy changes, and it wasn’t clear who would be responsible for implementing and enforcing them.
Smith reiterated that the plan is a “menu of options” that could be implemented once resources were available.
Meyer asked if the city had the power to implement the policies on their own without adopting the proposed plan, to which Smith said it could.
“What was in your mind about who would receive this, be familiar with it, answer questions about it, parlay with the outside entities that are involved with this?” asked Commissioner Steve Hayden.
Smith said that the department responsible for carrying out the recommended changes would likely vary depending on the circumstances of the project and the part of the city they would take place in.
The issue will likely come before the commission again in the coming months.
The next meeting of the Covington City Commission will take place on April 2 at 6 p.m. at Covington City Hall on Pike Street.