While beavers are busy at work constructing and reconstructing their dams and lodges with their iron-fortified front teeth for the winter, the Village of New Paltz has brought in heavier machinery to the Mill Brook Preserve to build a steel bridge that pedestrians can walk over without having to sink their feet into an ever-growing beaver pond. This fall, in concert with the Village Department of Public Works, Green Meadows Enterprise and OCE Contracting began to lay the groundwork for a steel bridge to cross over Tributary 13 at the trailhead to the Preserve from the end of North Manheim Boulevard. They announced this week that the bridge should be completed and ready to cross before the end of 2023.
The Mill Brook Preserve is a 134-acre parcel of protected public land owned by the town and village of New Paltz that stretches from behind Duzine Elementary School east to Woodland Pond and south to Manheim Boulevard. The land is watched over by the volunteer not-for-profit group the Millbrook Preserve, Inc. (MBPI).
Because of the location of this enchanted parcel, which is situated within walking distance of schools, businesses, parks, pools and residential homes, it receives a lot of foot traffic. Daily visitors to the Preserve range from dog-walkers to birders to elementary classes, runners, walkers and those just trying to get a bit of respite from the noise of life and enjoy the changing of the seasons inside this wooded sanctuary. There, Preserve users take the footpaths to get from work to school or school to home or from the town to the village.
It was for the latter reason, according to mayor Tim Rogers, that the Village of New Paltz applied for and received a $316,000 grant back in 2016 from the Environmental Protection Fund Grant Program for Parks, Preservation and Heritage. “I was just a baby mayor then,” joked Rogers, “with lots of hair on my head.” The intent, as Rogers recalled, was to apply for the grant to help promote connectivity “that would allow people to get from one place to another in the Village without having to get into a vehicle.”
Joined at the Preserve by two MBPI board members, including Lynn Bowdery, Rogers explained to Hudson Valley One that the process to get to the actual construction of the bridge “took a long time. At first, we went out to bid and the bids came in too high. We had to go back and find a way that we could build a bridge that would not float away, that would stand the test of time and that would not be too environmentally impactful.”
They worked closely with the MBPI, brought in a wetland delineator and worked to figure out the “smartest, safest, least impactful location and design for the bridge,” he said. To that end, once the location of the bridge was chosen (just to the left of the entrance to the Preserve from the bottom of Manheim Boulevard), the entities involved “carefully delineated each tree that would need to be cut down to make room for the machinery that needed to get into the Preserve to build the bridge,” said Rogers. As a measure both to cut costs and to have more oversight over tree pruning, the Village had its Department of Public Works (DPW) take down the trees.
Bowdery noted that they worked with the contractor Green Meadows, who also did the site work on the New Paltz Fire Station, to figure out a way to get the concrete work done without having to take down more trees. “The two slopes [on either side of the bridge] are very steep, and we could not figure out how they would get a concrete truck in here,” she said. What ended up happening was that the contractor had precast concrete buttresses made, which were forklifted down to the stream where the bridge would cross.
In another effort to save money and materials, the County DPW helped the Village by providing a reused section of bridge that had been in service somewhere else in Ulster County but was not being used at the time. “This is a steel bridge that they cleaned up and basically built for us,” said Rogers. “Now we’re trying to find out where the bridge was from originally. Was it in Marlboro? High Falls? That should be an interesting piece of history.”
“The bridge, designed by Peak Engineering, is being constructed with precast concrete and durable steel that can withstand the increase in water flows during weather events,” stated Ariana Basco, the grants administrator for this project. “This much-needed crossing will allow the beaver population that lives in the Preserve to be the natural architects that they are, with less impact to the human ability to enjoy the Preserve and vice versa.”
Asked why those visiting the Preserve couldn’t just hop across the streams or utilize the pedestrian footbridges that have been made by volunteers over the years, Rogers said, “Because not everyone can hop streams. We’re trying to make it more accessible for people.”
At the same time, the mayor noted that it is “a balancing act. We didn’t want to take down one more tree than we had to, and we want the path to be wide enough so that the construction vehicles could get to the stream, but not so wide that nature can’t begin to fill it back in.” He said that there will be some landscaping done once the project is complete, but otherwise, it will just be “nature taking its course.”
After the beaver pond that used to be located towards the northern end of the Preserve drained due to a flood wiping out a section of their dam, the mammals have reconvened towards the southern end of the Preserve and are creating another series of dams and lodges. Bowdery noted that the “stream corridor” has the richest biodiversity, with all kinds of wildlife, flora and fauna habituating to it. “I often see fox in the meadow that used to be the pond hunting food,” she said. There are blue herons, coyotes, fox, pileated and redheaded woodpeckers and of course, lots of beavers.
The total project cost is estimated at $451,000, of which the Village’s portion will be approximately $133,000 that will not be covered by grants. The scheduled construction completion date is the first week of December.
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