Planning and Developing Trails and Routes - Tourism and Trails: Cultural, Ecological and Management Issues - page 184

Letters of support from city leaders, corporations, influential individuals
and schools are essential.

• Emphasize the highest priority segments and projects. Perhaps only cer-

tain parts of a trail can be funded at any given time. This is better than
no funding at all. Such a focus will show granting agencies that construc-
tion or improvements have been well thought out and focused on the
most urgent needs at hand.

• Identify and address any obstacles or problems. The funding proposal

needs to be truthful in showing any issues that might thwart the
project efforts or raise challenges, including land acquisition problems,
for instance.

• Find appropriate funding sources and apply. Quantifiable and projected

data are very useful in helping to identify funding sources and in justify-
ing the monetary need.

• Communicate with planning and funding agencies to understand how

the application might be strengthened. Involve local officials in lobbying
the funding agencies on the trail developers' behalf.

In most trail destinations, it is crucial for organizations and agencies to
be as financially independent as possible, especially in lean times with public
budgets. Weaver (1995: 602) suggested four ways for trails to try to be as
fiscally independent as possible:

• encourage local schools, community groups, and businesses to 'adopt' a

section of trail over which they are responsible for its maintenance for a
specified period of time;

• permit visitors and long-term 'residential tourists' to sponsor a segment

of the trail to help with its upkeep;

• foster financial donations from non-local trail supporters; and

• encourage the use of local building materials and labor whenever possible.

Use of volunteers
Closely aligned with the issue of funding is the use of volunteers, as
already noted by Weaver (1995). Volunteers are crucial to the sustainabil-
ity of most paths, routes and trails, especially for budget-conscious agen-
cies. Unpaid staff can mean the difference between meeting conservation
and consumer service goals and allowing trails to suffer the consequences
of mismanagement.
Community residents and the tourists and recreationists themselves can
all become involved in volunteer efforts to construct trails or keep them
functioning properly (Rhoden et al. , 2009). Bristow (1998) describes three
major advantages of citizens becoming involved in the management of trails.
First, volunteers save public funds or organizational capital in a number of