A fireside chat with mastermind behind the White Oak Trail In Cary.

Please meet Paul Kuhn. He is a capital program manager and has worked for Town of Cary for last 20 years.  Paul is a licensed landscape architect and started his career with Parks and Rec

Department as a parks planner.  Over the last 20 years, his role has evolved but always been connected to trails, greenways and parks.

Varidx team was present at one of Paul’s impressive presentations on the story behind building of White Oak trail. The vision, budget, implementation and most importantly buy in from the residents.  

Paul enjoys his vison come to life, when he sees families enjying the trails and facilities. Most of the time, his imagination comes ture but sometimes it is not exactly what he thought will happen.  But the net positive is what makes the job fun.

The vision for White Oak trail started back in 1988.Cary did its one of probably its first parks master plan and it also include greenways and they even at that point they were looking at how can they have off road trails that will connect destinations in Cary.

Cary is a planned community fortunately. So all the growth that’s happened, we’ve been able to kind of be a little bit ahead of that and say, OK, here’s the type of growth we’re looking for and where where the growth should occur and the type of amenities that the public would like.
And so when we do these big master plans, we always have a public kind of input component of it and that that’s buried over the years. Typically, we’ll do surveys, we’ll have public meetings, just kind of show them early ideas and then come back and say, OK, here’s what we think we heard and have them kind of confirm that.

And so all the planning we do, and Cary kind of follows that process of reaching out to the public and trying to weigh in on what they want to see and where they want to go and what they want to do. And then that sets staff up to go, OK, here’s a specific project.

Big Projects are ambitious and then comes the funding question. So definitely you’ve got your big plan, you got your big vision and then you in a certain sense you kind of where is the the money, where, where can you do projects that will fill, fill those gaps.  Collaboration and partnership is very helpful in this arena. Regional connections with Morrisville and Apex on American Tobacco trail are examples of these partnerships.

Buy in from residents are a big component of the funding as they help approve the bond funding.Then in case of this project, we had to do a bond referendum and you had to get the support to move forward with the funding. And then we leveraged that bond funding and went after grants and we’re able to kind of complete the project because we had that initial support from the public.

When, when we did the 2012 bond referendum, we identified a couple projects and White Oak was one of the projects that we said if, if the bond’s approved, this is one of the projects that the money would go towards in order to do that.

And we’re very fortunate being in in Cary where where there has been growth and a fairly supportive community to do these quality of life items of parks and greenways.

Maintenance is a big componenet of ongoing service.  Cary has multiple departments and we work very closely with our public works department, which has around 100 people doing maintenance in our parks and greenways and fire stations and town hall.