Trail activist Tom Neenan of Center Point (Iowa) can remember back almost a quarter-century, when the main adversaries of Iowa 's emerging recreational trails were the skeptical owners of adjacent lands.

Landowners would lobby county supervisors against allowing trails to pass their land on old railroad easements, claiming vandalism, littering and rowdiness would follow. Even after volunteers built the Cedar Valley Nature Trail more than 25 years ago, wooden bridges sometimes burned mysteriously, and trees would be cut down across the trail.

Today, most landowners have accepted the trails, which have proven to be good neighbors. Trail pioneers like Neenan face a different kind of enemy: scarce funding.

While more state and federal funding is available for trails now than in the 1980s, when the Cedar Valley Nature Trail was built between Waterloo and Cedar Rapids , it's come with a price. Most grants come with strings attached requiring that trails be built to specific standards at greater expense.

As local governments pursue a record number of trail projects, land, material and building prices are skyrocketing. Government funding has increased little in recent years, leaving the funding gap up to local governments if they choose to bridge it.

"We used to buy land for $200 per acre or roughly $2,000 per mile," said Neenan, executive director of the Iowa Trails Council. "Now railroads are asking phenomenal prices for them, like $20,000 per mile."

High demand

Trail demand in Iowa consistently exceeds the state and federal assistance available by huge margins.

Trail planners seek funding from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources and Iowa Department of Transportation, which administer programs involving both state and federal funding.

One state funding stream for trail assistance is the State Recreational Trails Program, which provides grants to local governments that apply based on a scoring system. The program was funded at about $2 million in fiscal 2008, the same as in 2007 and about twice what it received in 2006.

In the latest funding round, the program received $18.6 million in local requests, more than nine times the amount available for distribution, according to Stuart Anderson, director of the DOT's Office of Systems Planning.

The DOT also administers the Federal Recreational Trails Program, which had 23 applications totaling $26 million in requests, but only $1.2 million to award in 2008.

Anderson said some local governments are trying to get around the funding bottleneck by lobbying their members of Congress for earmarks. These special designations in large funding bills for federal programs to benefit local projects are often derided as "pork" (for "pork-barrel legislation").

After the CEMAR Trail linking Cedar Rapids and Marion was repeatedly passed over at the state level, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, recently announced $350,000 in funding to Cedar Rapids through an earmark in a federal transportation bill to move the project forward.

One of the most popular trail projects under consideration in the Corridor would link trail systems in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids . An application for funding for the first phase of the project failed to win funding in three successive tries last year, said Janelle Rettig, chairwoman of the Johnson County Trails Advisory Committee.

"Local governments and conservation boards understand that trails are good business," Rettig said. "There's a reason that the local governments are out there advancing these grants, but the local governments are going to have to step up and increase funding of trails too."

Rettig said it's expected that a $20 million county bond issue slated for the November ballot in Johnson County could provide some funding to further trails projects.

Real estate debate

One of the reasons trail construction is expensive in Iowa is that Iowa has little public land, and the state does not allow use of eminent domain to buy property for recreational trails, said Jones County Conservation Department Director Larry Gullett. That means the government entity buying a trail easement must negotiate a purchase price with the landowner, rather than taking court action to take it for a public use and having a fair price set for the land under a legal process.

A disagreement over price with a landowner unwilling to sell a 100-yard strip of land can block an entire 10-mile trail corridor.

"In Iowa right now, the most important limiting factor for trail development is real estate, not money," said Gullett, who helped develop the 67-mile Raccoon River Valley Trail, the first trail developed in Iowa under the Rails to Trails Act.

Jones County has an ambitious trail program that includes completion of the east-west Grant Wood Trail from the Linn County border to Jackson County , where it eventually would reach the Mississippi River . But Gullett said land costs and construction expenses make the county's plans for water trails on the Maquoketa and Wapsipinicon rivers a better bet for completion in his lifetime.

"In this county, the cost of building a trail could be $300,000 to $400,000 inclusive," Gullett said. That would place the cost of the Grant Wood Trail at $8 million to $10 million in Jones County alone.

Trails within cities

A growing trend in trail development is providing connections between destinations within cities rather than the more traditional patterns of connecting cities along abandoned rail lines.

Urban trails are more expensive to develop, but they also are more cost-effective because they provide benefit to a greater population.

The Linn County Trails Association is among the groups lobbying for more connecting trails in the metro area.

Jon Bogert, the group's president, said urban trails tend to gain more use from commuters, as well as walkers, runners, parents with strollers, and inline skaters out for some quick exercise.

"We would obviously like to get it to where everybody has a trail in their vicinity, where they don't have to go to far to get on a trail," said Jon Bogert.

Mark Wyatt, president of the Iowa Bicycle Coalition in North Liberty , hasn't found a hot ticket to funding trails, but he has at least found one that's still warm. His group helps local communities apply for grants to tap funding from the DOT's Safe Routes to School grants program to build recreational trails. The program funds crosswalks and wide shoulders on roads, but also can be used for trails if they help children avoid dangerous traffic on their way to school.

Wyatt says the trails to school are a health issue as much as a safety issue. Wyatt says only a small fraction of the children who once walked to school now receive that form of exercise.

One of the best ways to build in-city trails advocated by Wyatt and others is to incorporate parallel trails when planning new roadway projects. That's a route Coralville and other Iowa cities are taking as they grow.