Part of the Greenbelt will be closed for repairs this winter. Will it affect your route?
About a mile of the Boise River Greenbelt in Garden City is expected to be closed to the public for about a month while crews repair the path that was damaged by flooding.
The Ada County Commission awarded the Parks and Waterways Department $2 million on Tuesday to begin the project.
The section, on the south side of the river downstream from the West Greenbelt Bridge near the Sun Rock gravel pits, will be closed from Monday, Dec. 11, to Friday, Feb. 16, said Robbie Sosin, program and education specialist with Ada County Parks and Waterways.
The section was damaged in the Snowmageddon winter of 2016-17, Sosin said by phone.
“During that time, river flows were really high,” Sosin said. “It caused a lot of damage down there. This spring, we closed down this section of the Greenbelt to do some streambank stabilization, and this is the next phase of that.”
The repairs will be made with concrete, which is less susceptible to erosion than asphalt, which is what the Greenbelt section consists of now, Sosin said.
Sosin said the department would give people more notice about the closure, but officials wanted to start the repairs before the spring, when the river flows higher with the snow pack.
The commissioners allocated the funds from the federal government’s 2021 American Rescue Plan Act.
Without the federal money, Sosin said the department would have had to plan for the repairs “for several years in the budget to make sure we’d be able to do it.”
Scott Koberg, director of Parks and Waterways, told the Statesman that he has tried since 2017 to include the repairs in their budget, but the county “didn’t have the budget to do full=scale concrete” on the repairs.
Anyone commuting from Eagle or Garden City to downtown Boise on the Greenbelt will have to detour to Chinden and face the traffic there, Sosin said. Or you can stick to the north side of the Greenbelt if you can. Koberg said it is important for people to avoid the area during construction.
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