Katy Trail to grow with eastward expansion

~ A recently announced deal would extend trail another 11 miles.

ST. CHARLES, Mo. -- The 225-mile Katy Trail is best known for crossing nearly the entire width of Missouri, but cyclists will soon be able to ride the trail even closer to the Illinois border.

State officials have reached an agreement to extend the trail from its current end in St. Charles another 11 miles north to Machens.

Trail advocates hope the extension will pave the way for links to other existing cycling and hiking trails along the Mississippi River and into the Illinois side of St. Louis.

"It gets it that much closer," said Dusty Reid, who oversees the trail's eastern section and is also superintendent of Confluence Point State Park. The park rests at the juncture of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in the town of West Alton.

The deal between the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the Consolidated North County Levee District provides the state an easement allowing the trail extension to avoid a spot where flood waters carved a gap.

In return, the state will pay the levee district $10,000 annually for maintenance fees, said Gov. Matt Blunt. The agreement also spells out the state's interest in a future extension along levee district property east from Machens to West Alton, a distance of roughly 10 miles.

Last year, the governor expressed support for a westward expansion of the trail, which currently ends about 75 miles southeast of Kansas City in the town of Clinton.

Blunt suggested that Ameren Corp. donate its Rock Island rail bed as partial compensation for the December 2005 breach of the AmerenUE Taum Sauk plant in southeast Missouri, which flooded Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park with 1.3 billion gallons of water.

Ameren owns the stretch of the rail corridor from Windsor -- a town 15 miles north of Clinton that also sits along the Katy Trail -- to the Kansas City suburb of Pleasant Hill. Union Pacific Railroad Co. owns the unused Rock Island section from Pleasant Hill to Kansas City.

On Wednesday, Blunt said that request has not been acted on while the utility fights a civil lawsuit over the Taum Sauk spill filed by Attorney General Jay Nixon.

"Ameren doesn't want to settle until after they've dealt with the lawsuit," Blunt said. "The lawsuit is really a roadblock to settlement."

An Ameren spokesman said settlement talks are continuing but declined further comment.

Extending the Katy Trail State Park would only strengthen the attraction of the nation's longest cycling and hiking path carved from a converted rail bed, the governor said.

"People come from literally all over the world to ride the Katy Trail," he said.

"To extend it across the state by connecting our two major metropolitan areas would make it even more of an attraction."

The state hopes to complete the trail's eastern expansion by late summer, said Blunt.