Owen Sound’s Nine Bends Trail remains closed and won’t be re-opening anytime soon.
Council during its meeting Monday approved recommendations from the community services committee, including re-allocating $10,000 previously set aside for engineering consulting to find short-term solutions to make the trail in the city’s southwest end temporarily safe for use again.
Those dollars will now be spent on the preparation of a tender for a major rehabilitation project, after an engineer ruled out pursuing interim work to open the trail quickly.
Nine Bends Trail is a popular sloped path that connects Greenwood Cemetery to 1st Street West — near the entrance to Harrison Park. It has been closed since April due to public safety concerns from slope failure, which has impacted drainage and also resulted in some fallen trees. Sinkholes have also appeared along the trail in recent years.
Community services committee members were told during their Sept. 23 meeting an engineer attended the site recently to review conditions, and “could not recommend interim works to allow public use of the trail to resume.”
A report by Owen Sound’s Director of Community Services Pam Coulter describes the trail as a popular connection, with thousands of pedestrian and cyclist trips on it each month when open.
Council has already approved spending up to $70,000 for engineering analysis and preliminary design of potential remediation options for Nine Bends Trail.
But that work still needs to be tendered and then undertaken, before any decisions are made by council on how to proceed. And then the remediation work itself needs to be done. All that’s a process that will likely keep the trail closed until sometime next year.
The city’s 2027 capital plan estimates it will cost $2.9-million to perform the required slope stability and storm water management work to alleviate safety concerns and allow Nine Bends Trail to re-open. That number is a preliminary estimate, and no final design alternative or project has been approved by council yet.