In the summer of 2022, Pamela Wattenmaker approached the Door County Community Foundation with an idea. She imagined a Door County in which it was easy for someone to walk from their home on the outskirts of town into the shopping areas downtown. She envisioned a system of trails that went from one village to the next, from one town to another. The challenge, of course, is how to bring that vision into reality.
As a result, under the auspices of the Door County Green Fund, a fund of the Door County Community Foundation, Inc., an ad hoc group of citizens, government officials, non-profit organizations, and local businesses began meeting to expand on that original vision and see if there were tangible steps that could be taken to move it forward. The team that formed had no defined membership roster, no formal standing, and no specific mandate. Rather, these were just people who shared the vision of an interconnected trail network for walkers, joggers, bikers, and the like. The team grew organically, as members identified and invited others who shared their enthusiasm for this work. Everyone was welcome.
The team began by looking at previous efforts to map out a multimodal trail system in Door County and even entered into discussions with several national consulting firms that could guide such a county-wide process. However, it was readily apparent that in other places in the country where such an interconnected system exists, the trails typically were located within a single municipality or involved just a small handful of units of government. That made it relatively straightforward when creating a shared vision. In Door County, such a county-wide interconnected multimodal trail network would likely require the coordinated effort of 1 county, 1 city, 4 villages, 14 towns, 5 school districts, and countless non-profit environmental organizations that control public lands.
Rather than try to define a shared vision, the team instead decided to collect and document the individual visions of all these public landowners in Door County. The goal is to help individual municipalities and organizations better understand what their neighbors are doing today, and what they plan to do in the decades ahead, in the hope that the players will come together themselves in a spirit of collaboration. If you know where your neighbor plans on building a new trail in the next decade, you might be more likely to alter your own future trail plans to enable them to connect.
The team’s greatest hope is that this document will foster greater conversation and collaboration between those entities that control public lands on the peninsula. If Door County is ever going to truly realize an interconnected trail system up and down our peninsula, it will ultimately take the efforts of individual units of government, and their citizens, all working together.
The Door County Community Foundation, and its component fund the Door County Green Fund, expect to be entertaining requests for funding from the non-profits and municipalities that will further this work. Consequently, Destination Door County has generously agreed to take a central role in helping move this effort into its next stage. To get involved, contact Amanda Stuck at amanda@doorcounty.org.
