MORGANTOWN – The city of Morgantown is redirecting some of its Community Development Block Grant funding to capitalize on a gift from West Virginia University.
Morgantown City Council recently moved a total of $301,248 in fiscal year 2025 CDBG funds to support the creation of a pedestrian bridge spanning Deckers Creek to provide direct access from lower Greenmont to the Deckers Creek Trail and the future site of a bike/skate skill park.
Late last year, council approved a $653,775 contract with Nature Trails LLC to construct the bike skills pump track.
The vast majority of the CDBG money being reallocated ($221,248) is being shifted away from the creation of a lower Greenmont neighborhood park in the immediate area.
While the pedestrian bridge has been contemplated as part of that park project long-term, it was not initially considered the primary focus.
City Manager Jamie Miller explained the sequencing changed when WVU offered to donate a 100-foot, pre-engineered fiber reinforced polymer bridge created as a demonstration project in the Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Sciences and currently located on the university’s agronomy farm.
The CDBG funds will be used to transport the bridge to its new home, construct abutments on either side of Deckers Creek with ADA compliant ramps, reassemble the bridge in place and reroute a short section of the Deckers Creek Trail to align with the bridge entrance.
The new span will be located near the convergence of Brockway and Pennsylvania avenues, next to the Kona Ice shop.
Due to the length of the donated structure, the new bridge abutments will be several feet behind existing abutments that once supported a vehicular bridge across Deckers Creek at that location.
Miller explained that while funds are being diverted out of the overall neighborhood park project, the park remains a priority.
She said roughly $272,000 remains allocated for that project.
“This is just peeling off a portion of it to move the pedestrian bridge forward,” she said. “Efforts toward the lower Greenmont green space do remain a priority. Staff, in fact, just this week or last week met with HRG design group, who’s completed surveys. They did some borings last week. They are working through some landscape architecture plans and working to bring some concepts back to the neighborhood.”
CDBG is a program through which the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development provides direct funding to entitlement communities using a formula based on factors like poverty rate, housing conditions and population.
