Community Partnerships Helped Bring Pedestrian Bridge Project Over The Finish Line

Nearly five years after it was acquired by the Mills County Trails Board, the pedestrian bridge over Keg Creek in Glenwood is finally completely installed and open.

The 9-foot tall, 165-feet long by 7 ½ -feet wide structure now serves as a link between the Glenwood Community School District’s athletic complex on the west side of the bridge and open green space on the east side, which once housed the

Glenwood Native American Earth Lodge. The green space is now owned by the school district and will be utilized for athletic complex event parking.

“We’re very excited the bridge is open and I can tell you our kids are pretty darn excited as well – they can park over there and walk across for softball,” said GCSD Superintendent Nicole Kooiker. “I think we’ll probably need to add some solar lighting. It’s a little dark over there. We just want to make sure there’s enough lighting where it’s completely safe for people to be utilizing it.”

The trails board purchased the bridge for $20,000 from an Omaha recycling firm in 2020. The structure had previously served as a pedestrian bridge along the Keystone Trail in Omaha near the College of St. Mary and AkSarBen Village entertainment area. Components of the bridge were delivered to Glenwood in December of 2020, but the structure wasn’t actually placed over the bridge until February 2024.

The bridge was purchased as part of the Mills County Trail Board’s long-term effort to develop a recreational trails system, however multiple issues delayed the structure’s placement and opening, including required studies and approval from the Iowa Department Of Natural Resources, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency. The project was further delayed when bids for placement of the bridge came in higher than expected in 2023.

The bridge was installed in February 2024, but some safety concerns still needed to be addressed, creating additional expense and pausing the opening.

The ongoing partnership between Mills County Trails, City of Glenwood and Glenwood Community School District was vital in getting the bridge project over the finish line. Mills County also contributed, pledging $150,000 to the trails project.

“We’ve definitely been working with our community partners and people have done a great job stepping up and doing various parts for us,” Kooiker said. “They did different stuff. The school district did different stuff. Over the course of the last few months, we worked together extremely well, ensuring we get it open.

“The city helped us greatly in conversations and assisting in making sure we could get this open, which has been the goal. There’s no use having a bridge if you can’t let people walk across it.”

Kooiker said now that the bridge is open, the school district will be responsible for its maintenance and upkeep because the district owns the property on both the east and west sides of the structure. Many of the final repairs and improvements made to the bridge before it was opened to the public came at the request of the school district’s insurance carrier.

“A lot of it was about securing what’s called toe straps. It’s actually the board pieces that are on the sides to make sure the boards aren’t too loose and there’s a tripping hazard,” she said. “They also wanted to make sure that nobody could fall off.

You can see the fencing goes all the way down to the bottom. We checked it to see if could secure it any way and people could slide out. There’s no way. There’s fencing pretty high from the bottom.”

Some warped boards were also replaced, Kooiker noted.

Many of the final repairs and enhancements to the bridge were made by Glenwood Public Works employees.

“The school insurance carrier had concerns – rail on the slope of the bridge to the grass side, bottom of fencing attached and board’s straightened,” Glenwood City Administrator Mitch Kolf noted. “Jamey’s (Public Works Director Jamey Clark) crew figured out a way to get it done, got the boards straightened out and a few other little things done.”

The bridge’s placement required the school district to reposition the shot put and discus areas of its track and field complex.

“Frank (Bachman– GCSD Director Of Operations) and team did a lot of work on the side of the stadium, making sure that we move the discus and shot put,” Kooiker said. “All of that looks really nice on that end.”

To date, Kooiker said the school district has invested about $250,000 in the bridge and the renovations that took place at the track and field complex. She added that down the road, gravel or asphalt could be placed over the grassy parking area east of the bridge, but the area will remain green for the immediate future.

In addition to the solar lighting, Kooiker said a camera is also going to be installed on the bridge.

“Just so we can review and monitor,” she said. “We haven’t had trouble with our other bridge from the middle school and the high school. We haven’t had any issues. People utilize it and we’re expecting the same thing out of this one, but any steps we can take, we want to make sure we have the bridge around for a long time. It took a long time to get it there.”

The bridge over Keg Creek is one of two pedestrian bridges that have been installed as the result of the efforts of the Mills County Trail Board.  In 2024, a 90-foot bridge made from a 46,000-pound flatbed railcar donated by Union Pacific Railroad was placed over Fallon’s Creek, near the horseshoe pits at Glenwood Lake Park. It replaced the unsteady “Scary Bridge” that had been positioned over the creek for decades.

The installation costs for both bridges came in higher than engineers had projected, forcing the city to scale back its plan for recreational trails and return thousands of dollars in grant money.

“The city is regrouping, reevaluating based upon the funding that we have after the bridge projects, which were more expensive than planned,” Kolf said. “We’re working on rescoping some of the grants that we got through MAPA (Metropolitan Area

Planning Agency) to put a trail in. Everything is still tentative – we’re still trying to get all the approvals and see how much it would cost and if we have the matching funds for the grant.

“We’re trying to rescope the trails project now to be smaller than the original ambitious project that required us to have over $1 million in funding to go along with the grants. That’s much more than what we have available.”

The tentative plan now is to work toward getting a portion of paved trail built that would connect the east side of the pedestrian bridge with Glenwood Community High School.

“It would loop around a potential parking area if the school ever wants to put it in on the school-owned area,” Kolf said.  “It would go up along Sharp Street toward the high school and connect to the sidewalks there.”

Additionally, the city is considering an underpass trail under the Sharp Street bridge that crosses Keg Creek, linking the pedestrian bridge to Glenwood Lake Park. Kolf said the city will likely reapply for some of the grant funding once a new plan and costs are finalized.

“We returned the DNR state recreational trails grant,” he said. “Their grant’s much more restrictive and less flexible on making changes than the grants we got through MAPA. For them, we need to reapply.

“They said our current plan is a good one. They would like to fund it but we would have to reapply to use their funding because we’ve changed the scope of the project.”

Kolf said the city will likely wait until next year to reapply for the grants.