Metuchen is making progress on work on the Middlesex County Greenway and will apply to a state grant to help reduce the borough’s carbon footprint, councilman William Waldron said at a July 13 Borough Council meeting.
“The environmental commission is working on the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions, (ANJEC), grant that we were awarded for the Middlesex Greenway Extension Plan,” Waldron said at the meeting. “We will be planning a walk along the Greenway to see what vision we have and the planner has for the development of this vital resource here in Metuchen.”
At a June 1, 2009 council meeting, Waldron had mentioned that the Metuchen environmental commission had received notice of an ANJEC award in the amount of $8,000, the maximum awarded, to conduct a study of the Middlesex Greenway. Additional funds in the amount of $10,000 from two developers and $4,000 from the borough will also go towards that study, according to Mayor Thomas Vahalla.
Metuchen’s section of the Middlesex Greenway is approximately one mile in length. But the Middlesex Greenway is just one small part of a much larger East Coast Greenway (wiki) that will run from Calais, Maine at the Canadian border all the way south to Key West, Florida. Started in 1991, it is planned as a beautiful 3,000 mile lowland Appalachian Trail that will run through almost every major city on the east coast on public-right-of-way by linking together locally managed trails into a continuous route. Work is projected to be substantially completed in 2010.
