Liz is the Greenway Coordinator for the Roanoke Valley Greenway Commission. She works tirelessly with five of the surrounding local governments to coordinate the development and maintenance of greenway pedestrian trails across the region. With an extensive trail network constructed by both local volunteers and professional construction crews, Liz oversees the initial trail mapping, legal work and grant writing, fundraising, and ultimately construction. Find out how to land a job as an environmental coordinator and also how a degree in forestry could come in handy down the road!
Transcript
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.
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