What should the city ask?

A public workshop will be held this Thursday night at the Electric City fire station to develop survey questions for the proposed Pathways project. The meeting begins at 5:30 p.m.

The public is invited to attend and take part by sharing their thoughts and vision of Electric City.

A large group of stakeholders met in January to get the discussions going on an Electric City trail system but couldn’t agree on a set of questions for a community survey.

Deputy Clerk Russell Powers, who is organizing the meeting, said the group will develop questions and discuss the best way for them to be distributed.

Powers said Monday that the team from Washington State University’s Rural Communities Design Initiative will use the survey information after it is returned for two public meetings.

The deputy clerk said that the first meeting will likely be held in April.

At the initial meeting a host of agencies, federal, state, county and local, met to talk about the pathway and how to proceed. Among the stakeholders at the January meeting were the Bureau of Reclamation, National Park Service, Washington State Department of Transportation, Grant County Health District, WSU, Gray & Osborne engineers, Coulee Medical Center and other local groups.

Running Thursday night’s meeting will be Tiffany Quilter of Grant County Health.

The Pathway project is the brainchild of Electric City Councilmember Brad Parrish, who has been working on the idea since last spring.

The trail would eventually go from Sunbanks Lake Resort to North Dam Park, with phase one connecting Coulee Playland with North Dam Park.

In January, the DOT representative Paul Mahre stated that he favored the idea of a trail system but admitted the section of phase one presented problems. It’s narrow enough to be dangerous for walkers, but in a difficult place to widen.

The Electric City council has voted $40,000 from its hotel/motel reserve fund to take care of the WSU team expenses and pay for the finished plan, which will be developed by Gray & Osborne.

In addition to those funds, the council voted to reserve $400,000 from its hotel/motel monies to provide matching funds for grants and otherwise support the building of the trail.

Electric City receives about $70,000 a year in hotel/motel money from three hospitality concerns — Sunbanks, Coulee Playland and the Sky Deck Motel.