President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal Year 2023 omnibus funding bill into law Dec. 29, 2022, giving final approval to $178 million in federal funding for projects in Colorado, among other things. The completion of the sidewalk running from Granby’s Kaibab Park to City Market will receive $1.325 million from the bill’s Congressionally Directed Spending.

The town has been working on the path since at least 2013 and has been trying to complete the “halfway pathway” since at least 2021. The sidewalk only made it to the Grand Elk Golf Course maintenance building before the project ran out of funding. 

Around July or August 2022, Granby made a proposal to Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and Rep. Joe Neguse to request Congressionally Directed Spending funding for the sidewalk. Granby Town Manager Ted Cherry said Neguse led the effort to obtain the funding, but getting final approval came as a surprise.

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“It was alluded to back in September that we were not going to receive the funding,” Cherry said. “Then in December, I received an email that said that we had been awarded the funding for the pathway project.”

In December the town got an engineer’s estimate of $1.75 million for the cost of completing the sidewalk, so Cherry said town staff will keep working on obtaining more grants. Granby budgets have budgeted about half of the project in previous years, just in case a grant came in those years to pay for the other half of the project, so Cherry expects the town could use capital funds to cover the cost if it cannot secure another grant.

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Cherry said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or the U.S. Department of Transportation will manage the funds for the project, and the town should hear from one or the other in a month or two and receive the funds two to four weeks later. The funds must be allocated by the end of September, and the project will need to have an environmental impact study done because it is using federal funding.

“There’s still a number of things that we need to work through on this to make sure that it comes to fruition,” Cherry said.”I think we’re probably 90% there at this point in time, outside of the actual construction.”

After the town requests and selects a bid, Cherry estimated the construction would take 45-60 days. The board of trustees has discussed having the same crews work on pathway and Thompson Road construction to decrease mobilization costs, something Cherry said is possible but would require the same company to bid on and be awarded contracts for both projects.

“If the same contractor is able to do Thompson Road and the trail project, I would hope that there would be some cost savings there,” Cherry said. “Just from, you know, having crews on site and around, but I don’t want to count my chickens on anything.”

Cherry said Granby plans to keep the walkway open during the winter months and pointed out that the pathway’s completion would also better connect the Fraser to Granby Trail, which currently runs from Kaibab Park to Fraser by running along roads in the Grand Elk neighborhood until it reaches Thompson Road and U.S. Highway 40.