Mayfield Heights would hurt itself and the region if it nixes a planned median trail on

MAYFIELD HEIGHTS, Ohio — Sean Ward, the parks and recreation director of Mayfield Heights, a middle-income Cuyahoga County suburb of 18,700 residents located east of the Interstate 271 freeway, is a nervous guy these days.

He worries that an excellent proposal for installing a recreational trail in the Gates Mills Boulevard median representing four years’ worth of planning, could be trashed by a last-minute reversal in political support, even though sources of full funding have been identified, and the project is all but ready to build this summer.

The issue may come to a head Monday at the city’s upcoming council meeting, where members are scheduled to vote on whether to spend $112,000 on detailed design, engineering, and administration, a critical step toward building the trail this year.

What’s needed, Ward says, is for supporters to show up rather than allow the meeting to be dominated by what he calls a vocal minority of residents opposed to the project, which has tipped some Council members against the trail. It’s a speak-now-or-blow-it moment.

A use for fallow land

The project would turn the grassy, 130-foot-wide median between the boulevard’s east and westbound lanes into a linear park with an all-purpose trail meandering down the middle.

The trail would extend three-quarters of a mile across the city’s southeast corner between the boulevard intersection at Cedar Avenue and the SOM Center Road traffic circle.

The trail would create a safe place to walk, push a stroller, or ride a bike amid subdivisions built in the 1950s and ‘60s without sidewalks. And it would add trees and new drainage to prevent low-lying areas from getting swampy during heavy rains.

Additional sections of the trail could be extended in the future heading north from the SOM Center circle to Marsol Road, and then heading west to the city’s new $20 million aquatic and community center, planned for construction starting this summer.

But without the median trail, Ward said, the city’s southeast corner will remain cut off without any way to reach the rec center other than by car, or by walking in the gutters on Gates Mills Boulevard, the area’s status quo.

No-brainer

The trail project is a no-brainer. It may also sound like a small beans issue in a large county, but it has big regional implications. Apart from its local merits, it has the potential to become part of an emerging countywide network identified in Cuyahoga County’s outstanding Cuyahoga Greenways Plan, completed in 2019.

That county plan calls for creating 815 miles of bike lanes and off-road trails, a six-fold increase over the existing mileage, to link the county’s 59 communities to downtown Cleveland, Lake Erie, and regional parks.

For example, the plan suggests that eventually, a recreational path could extend north from Mayfield Heights along SOM Center Road to the Cleveland Metroparks North Chagrin Reservation.

Such connections would help retrofit a sprawling urban and suburban region whose streets and public spaces have been designed for too long to cater primarily to the automobile.

Great as it is, the county plan has an Achilles’ heel. Because the county is not a home rule government with power over land use and zoning, trail construction depends entirely on whether municipalities will build the segments identified for them in the plan.

If Mayfield Heights is any indication, it could take decades of wrangling to realize the big vision.

What’s likely is that a patchwork of trails will emerge, piecemeal, as individual communities come around to the idea that building safe, accessible, linear parks makes tremendous good sense. And that’s exactly what’s happening now in suburbs west of Mayfield Heights.

Relic of the past

The Gates Mills Boulevard median is part of a regional right-of-way established in the 1920s by Cleveland’s Van Sweringen brothers to carry an extension of the rapid transit rail line the developers used to link Shaker Heights to the Terminal Tower, finished in downtown Cleveland in 1931.

The brothers’ real estate empire famously imploded during the Depression, leaving the unusually wide median as a relic of real estate hubris. It extends between the separated east and westbound lanes of Shaker Boulevard east of Green Road, where the Green Line Rapid now ends, and then turns northeast on Gates Mills Boulevard at the Brainard Road traffic circle in Pepper Pike.

Capitalizing on that leftover space, Beachwood in 2004 turned its 1.2-mile section of the Shaker Boulevard median into a beautiful linear park extending east from the Shaker Heights line to the Brainard roundabout.

Shaker Heights followed suit in 2007, building multi-purpose paths on the 1.5 miles of the Shaker Boulevard median that extends west from the Beachwood park to Warrensville Center Road.

Pepper Pike, for its part, revamped the Brainard roundabout last summer, narrowing its excessively wide traffic lanes to make the area safer for pedestrians and cyclists. It also improved the center of the circle as a beautiful park with new trails and landscaping.

Pepper Pike is now planning to extend a trail in the Gates Mills Boulevard median extending 2.3 miles to Cedar Avenue in Mayfield Heights. Pepper Pike has applied for the same type of state funding that Mayfield Heights could forego if it dumps its own trail project.

Richard Bain, the mayor of Pepper Pike, said the median trail is needed to modify a community designed without sidewalks so it retains a younger generation of residents who want safe alternatives to getting around by car.

“The only people who are significantly opposed to the idea of sidewalks are the demographic 80 years and above,’’ Bain said. “I respect their opinion but I also acknowledge that they are not the future of Pepper Pike.”

Property owners in Mayfield Heights should pay heed to those words.

Flip-flop

The median trail in Mayfield Heights had firm support from Council two years ago when the city applied to the Clean Ohio Trails Fund for $500,000 to build the project, Ward said.

The suburb received $497,000 and has assembled other funds to pay the full cost, now estimated at $778,000. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District will provide $149,000, leaving the city to provide $115,000 in cash, plus $16,000 of in-kind services, he said.

The Clean Ohio grant application obligated the city to build the trail if it won the money, he said. What’s changed since then is that a number of homeowners on the boulevard — a minority according to Ward — have come out against the project, now that it’s close to becoming a reality.

According to an email poll done by the city, 31 of 57 residents along the boulevard are in favor of the project, while 17 are firmly opposed, and nine are uncertain. Some council members appear to be listening only to the opponents, Ward said.

“It’s frustrating,’’ he said. “You do everything and you get to the end, and the finish line gets pulled down.’’

Ward said the opponents don’t have a consistent critique of the median trail. Council members including Robert DeJohn and Donald Manno have raised numerous questions, and both remain opposed, as they indicated in interviews earlier this week.

“I’ve been against it since day one,’’ Manno said. “It’s the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I’m against it because right now because there are too many open-ended questions,’’ said DeJohn.

One reason he’s opposed is that the project has been redesigned to save $23,000 by removing parking spaces that were part of the original design. Now that the parking is out, DeJohn said the park would not be accessible to persons with disabilities, a contention that Ward says is false.

It’s not clear whether any answers from Ward or other project supporters could change opponents’ minds. There’s a difference between asking questions to help improve a project versus using them to justify dumping it.

Possible canard

It’s possible that, deep down, what really concerns residents is whether outsiders using the trail would disturb the peace. In a majority-white eastern…