-: I am Liz Belcher.
I'm the Renick Valley Greenway Coordinator.
I work for five local governments in the Renick Valley.
My job is to coordinate the development
of the Greenway network.
The greenways being bicycle/pedestrian trails
that we're building across the region.
Volunteers build all the nature surface trails,
and the paved trails are built by contractors.
So, my job is to coordinate all that,
and to get money and resources to make it happen.
We go out and we walk those corridors,
and assess their potential.
Is this a nice place to be?
Are people gonna want to use it?
Can we get the right of way?
When the locality commits to building that,
then they will hire a professional engineer
to do the design, the stormwater management,
the engineering things that have to be done,
and then they'll contract the construction.
So, we get money in a variety of ways.
One, is locality can put up capital money.
That happens sometimes.
And, that requires going to City Council meetings
and saying, "You're gonna need five hundred thousand dollars
"to do this project."
More frequently what we do is apply for grants.
In 2007, we decided we were never gonna finish
Reneck River Greenway unless we got some more money.
So, we had a private campaign that we call
Bridge the Gap.
So, I have written the trail plans
for Mill Mountain Park,
for Carven's Cove Park.
In doing that, we actually went out and measured grades
and things like that, and evaluated different trails.
I go out with the Wednesday crew, that I have.
The Mid-Week Crew, we call them.
I go out and help lay out the projects
that they're going to do, and then sometimes I go out
and kind of review what they're doing to be sure
that it's gonna be a sustainable trail.