MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The bill considered a massive opportunity to increase local tourism for North Central West Virginia is slowly taking shape.
After the recent passing of two bills in the House of Delegates and the State Senate, the Mountaineer Trail Network is gaining more ground in turning concept into reality.
“It truly is an economic project,” said trail advocate Jason Donahue on WAJR’s “Talk of the Town” With Dave Wilson and Sarah Giosi.
Donahue, founder of FEOH Realty, said the way to increase tourism in the region is actually quite simple.
“If you want to increase tourism, you need to increase the things that you offer an outsider to do,” he said. “You need to have more things. We need to have more reasons for people to come here.”
If the system is fully achieved, there’s belief from legislators and advocates for the project that tourism could boom in the region — thanks to the trail that would exist in parts of Marion and Harrison counties.
“It truly is an economic project,” he said. “That’s the goal — it’s to bring people from out of town into our community and give them a good experience.”
The bill passed in the House, allows for the formation of the Mountaineer Trail Network Recreation Authority, which will allow Donahue and other members of the board to begin negotiating for funds in order to make the trail fully realized. The Senate also passed a bill which allows for three or more adjacent counties to form a multicounty trail network authority. With both bills complimenting each other, it allows for Donahue and other representatives to present a funding plan to the five counties that would be involved.
“The sum of the parts is greater than the individual contribution so that it’s not something that is too much for each individual governent entity,” Donahue said.
Local, state, and federal funds are all part of his vision.
“You put together a package that funds it to get through the construction phase,” he said.
Along with Marion and Harrison counties, Monongalia, Preston and Taylor will all be part of the Mountaineer Trail Network Authority.
One of the key selling points on the Mountaineer Trail Network is the opportunity all participating counties get in recieving tourism dollars, Donahue said. Those who travel for moutain biking excursions usually spend about two to three days per trip and spend approximately $400 in the process, including hotel and food expenses. Donahue, who previously was involved in the development of the Hatfield-McCoy Trail in southern West Virginia, feels that mountain biking has a solid economic base.
“If we have several thousand, and I think the Hatfield-McCoy trail averages about 40,000 to 50,000 visitors per year, so if we can get to that, which I think we could far exceed for the simple reason that there are more mountain bikes than ATV’s,” he said.
Another selling point Donahue noted: the profit potential for the project. In particular, Donahue is excited by how realatively inexpensive it would cost for the Mountaineer Trail Network to become a reality.
“The cost to do it should be in the realm of possible and what you do is that you don’t do it all in one time,” he said. “So it might take 15 years to make 1,500 miles, it might take 10 years to build 150 miles but you do it as economically and efficiently as you possibly can.”
One major boon already: Donahue said many of the structural challenges that face southern West Virginia — a lack of diversity in hotel choices and adjacent businesses — don’t exist in the Morgantown area.
“We don’t have that problem here,” he said. “Up and down I-79, we literally have clusters of hundreds of hotels together with businesses immediately adjacent to it. It would be an ideal situation for people to come in, ride right where the hotel is, and then walk to where they can have dinner or a beer.”
Story by Joe Nelson