The Texas Transportation Commission approved $345 million in grants for projects across the state Thursday morning. One of those grants will fund the construction of the first shovel-ready portion of the 17-mile Five Mile Greenbelt trail—a roughly 1.1-mile stretch from Westmoreland to Hampton roads.
The $6.6 million in funding comes from a Texas Department of Transportation program that seeks local projects that specifically address transportation alternatives like bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. The call for this round of funding was announced last December, and the city of Dallas and the nonprofit Trust for Public Land, which is leading the project, submitted an application in January.
“We’ve been working with TxDOT on traffic calming, safe routes to schools, budgets—it’s a pretty intense application,” Molly Plummer, a Trust staff member, said Thursday morning shortly before the Commission met. “There are a lot of projects that don’t get funded.”
In June, the project received a $6.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Biden Administration’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity program. That money was slated to help finish designing and engineering the remainder of the trail.
The latest infusion of cash will get a further boost from a matching investment of $1.65 million from the Trust’s philanthropic partners, which means more than $8 million will be available to build that first leg of the trail.
The entire Five Mile Greenbelt project will include three new parks and 17 miles of trail extending east near the Westmoreland DART station and then into the Trinity Forest through southern Oak Cliff. Plummer said that construction on that 1.1-mile stretch should begin by 2025—it will still need to go through an approval process to meet federal transportation standards and then a public bidding process, which will take most of next year.
All told, the Trust and the city of Dallas have racked up more than $35 million in funding through state and federal grants and private dollars—not quite half of the $78 million needed to complete the entire project.
Jared White, a transportation planner with the city of Dallas who has worked closely with the Trust, said that remarkable pace surprised him.
“I’m very happy to see this is now moving very quickly—I thought it would take much longer. It’s taken decades to get here, and I thought it would take decades more to get it built,” he said. “But things are moving rapidly now, and it’s very exciting to see we can affect some real change in these areas.”
The Five Mile trail will also link to the 50-mile Loop Trail, bringing residents along the Greenbelt a safe way to travel throughout southern Dallas and to destinations further north, too. Plummer said the first stretch will be “a really important trail connection” that will reach from Kiest Park to within about 900 feet of Zan Wesley Holmes Jr. Middle School, providing students with a safer route to school.
“It’s actually a really great place to see the potential of Five Mile Creek Green Belt because it really exemplifies so much what we’re trying to accomplish here— connecting communities with parks, with schools, with workforce destinations, and with retail destinations,” said Robert Kent, the Trust’s Texas director. “It’s a great example of how all these things come together and how this trail is a connective tissue between all those pieces.”
Those connections will be the big reason the project continues to attract transportation grants, Kent, Plummer, and White said. While many think of trails and parks as a luxury, the trail will also provide safer mobility for the more than 180,000 people who live along the Greenbelt.
Kent recalled watching a young family forced to walk on Coombs Creek Drive, a winding road with no sidewalks and several blind turns. The trail would allow families to take that same walk without the danger of being hit by a car, he said.
“We have to remember that,” Kent said. “This is not some luxury sparkly gold-plated thing; like, this is transportation infrastructure. This is helpful. This is about getting people to school and to jobs as much as it is about being able to spend a relaxing Saturday afternoon in nature—and we can never forget that.”
Even though the Trust is more than halfway to its goal, Plummer said the key to unlocking more state and federal dollars will be local funding. They’re asking for about $7 million from the proposed 2024 bond, and the Trust has a plan to make that money stretch.
“Local funding is going to unblock the continued federal funding of some of these Trail components,” she said. Kent said through federal and state grants that will become available with city investment, they can turn that $7 million into $28 million.
“The way we like to think about it is that for every dollar we get locally, we can match four to one,” he said. “I wish my savings account would yield that kind of return.”
Also included in the $345 million funding Thursday was $223,215 for a pedestrian crossing at Valley View Lane and Mercer Parkway in Farmers Branch and $25 million to Dallas Area Rapid Transit for walking and bike paths along the Cotton Belt and Silver Line trails in Far North Dallas.
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