HARLINGEN — Even city officials like it when a plan comes together.
A broad, decades-long commitment to develop bike, hike and paddling trails will be signed by 10 Cameron County cities at a ceremony today in Brownsville.
The initiative goes by a name that’s a workout in itself — The Lower Rio Grande Valley Active Transportation and Active Tourism Plan. In shorthand, it’s referred to as The Active Plan.
“Getting 10 communities together is a huge accomplishment,” said Gil Penalosa, an internationally recognized transportation expert who founded 8 80 Cities, a Canadian nonprofit that promotes biking, hiking and parks worldwide.
“But also that is transformative,” Penalosa said. “Sometimes even the process of getting them together is going to help to lead to so many other benefits.”
The 10 cities are Harlingen, San Benito, Combes, Laguna Vista, Los Indios, Port Isabel, Rancho Viejo, Brownsville, Los Fresnos and South Padre Island.
The Active Plan will incorporate the Harlingen-San Benito Metropolitan Planning Organization’s bike-ped master plan — which cost $79,000 to produce. But Harlingen officials say the plans, both developed by consultants Halffe Associates, will mesh pretty much seamlessly.
“What we did is we took the map and overlaid it on the top of our hike-and-bike master plan, our Harlingen-
San Benito MPO plan, and they all connect to each other,” said Harlingen City Manager Dan Serna. “The connectivity is there not only within our community, but also outside our community, connecting different cities like Brownsville and San Benito to each other.”
The Harlingen-San Benito MPO master plan envisioned spending between $16 million and $58 million over the next two decades or so to link trails, paths and parks.
Officials so far, probably by design, haven’t put a price tag on The Active Plan. But they say any expenditures would be spread over the next several decades.
“There’s no time limit,” said Eva Garcia, who works for the Brownsville Planning Department and has been instrumental in moving The Active Plan forward.
“It will take 20 to 30 years at least,” Garcia said. “The Great Allegheny Passage is an example that we use. It took 30 years to build and 80 million dollars but they now generate over a 100 million dollars annually.”
Complete from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, the 150-mile Great Allegheny Passage connects with the 184.5-mile C&O Canal Towpath to create a 335-mile non-motorized route between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.
“It might take us several decades, and because we don’t want to use taxpayer money we want to leverage as many grants as we can and that tends to take time,” Garcia added.
The Active Plan, officials here say, has multiple goals.
One is to provide recreational and exercise opportunities for Valley residents and their families to try to counteract the region’s high rate of obesity.
Secondly, they claim that when completed, The Active Plan will be a tourism draw given the Valley’s mild weather year-round.
Penalosa, a native of Bogota, Colombia, who emigrated to Canada, focused much of his address yesterday on the benefits to Valley residents from The Active Plan.
He noted the obesity epidemic here, low household incomes and what he sees as the overdependence of Valley residents on driving.
“We need to develop a sense of urgency on some of the issues that are happening in the Valley,” Penalosa said. “One of the things that is very clear is that the income, the average income, is very, very low.
“It’s about half the national average,” he added, “and that isn’t going to improve substantially in the short term.”
Even if it does, he said, it doesn’t mean we’ll be any happier or healthier.
“The U.S. has never been as wealthy as it is today,” he said. “However, the rate of happiness is very low.”
“So The Active Pan is one of the things that are going to improve the levels of happiness, that are also going to improve the levels of health.
“We’re going through a huge crisis,” he said. “Here in the Valley we have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. We can change that, but we need to change. And change is hard.
“It’s so much easier to do more of the same, so I’m very happy to find so many champions that are seeing the little crack in the window and they’re running right through it,” he said.
“When we say no to things we’re also saying yes to others,” he continued. “If we say no to trails through some neighborhoods, we’re saying yes to more obesity, we’re saying yes to less social integration, we’re saying yes to more sprawl.
“So it’s very important to do this kind of project,” he said. “And if it is fantastic for the local people, then you’re going to have a lot of tourists also.”
