SLO County picked $36 million new route to save Bob Jones Trail. How will they pay for it?
After years of stalled negotiations with reluctant property owners, a new plan is in place to finish building the Bob Jones Trail from San Luis Obispo to the sea.
The plan has the support of the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors, but the expensive new design is running a bill of $36 million that the county can’t yet fully pay for.
Now, a community group is leading fundraising efforts to fill the $6 million gap needed to finish the trail.
Traveling between the Five Cities area and San Luis Obispo by bike is a popular option for commuters, but this currently requires them to ride down heavily trafficked, dangerous roads, Friends of the Bob Jones Trail president Helene Finger said.
“There is really no safe way for them to do that now, and so this is a critical need for many members of our community,” Finger said. “The longer it gets prolonged, the more time people are unsafe.”
The majority of the funding has already been secured for the 4-mile segment of the trail the county plans to build, including an $18 million federal grant, $8 million from the San Luis Obispo Council of Governments and an additional $6 million contribution from Caltrans.
The county already used $2 million of the federal grant for pre-construction costs like design and land acquisition, leaving $16 million for construction.
This means the county must fill a $6 million funding gap.
Local nonprofit Friends of the Bob Jones Trail launched a fundraising effort that aims to raise $1 million in donations by Jan. 30. The goal is to secure grants to fund the remainder of the project, she said.
“No donation is too small,” Finger said. “What we’re trying to show to the California Transportation Commission is that there’s this huge community support, and the more people we have contributing, the better.”
Nonprofit launches fundraiser to complete new trail design
The original design for the Bob Jones Trail ran through multiple properties along the stretch between San Luis Obispo and Avila Beach, some of whose owners refused to sell their land or access rights to the county.
After more than a decade of failed negotiations with the unwilling property owners, the county was forced to pivot to a new plan.
The new “bookend approach” divides the Bob Jones Trail to avoid the withholding properties. Instead, the path would reroute onto a strip of Caltrans owned-land next to Highway 101 for a stretch between Clover Ridge Lane and Ontario Road, county civil engineer John Waddell told The Tribune.
The county will use its $18.2 million grant to fund construction of the bookends on either side of the Highway 101 stretch, while Caltrans pledged to use $6 million of discretionary State Highway Operation and Protection Program funds to help fill in the gap in the trail along the highway.
But it still isn’t enough.
By Jan. 27, the county must submit a nearly complete design plan to the California Transportation Commission, which includes any land acquisition agreements that are still needed for the new alignment and a plan to fill funding gaps, if there are any.
That is where the Friends of the Bob Jones Trail has come in.
The effort to raise $1 million by the Jan. 30 commission meeting aims to prove that the county has the funding needed to complete the project on time, Finger said.
“We really want them to have full confidence that we will have the money in hand that we need to construct the project,” she said.
As of Friday, people had donated $4,734 to the project through PayPal, according to the website. People could also pledge to donate in 2025, 2026 or 2027 through a Google Form at bit.ly/3BsPaye.
“We have very broad community support,” Finger said. “We’ve had donations from the entire Central Coast, down to Santa Maria, up to North County.”
To make a tax-deductible donation, visit thebobjonestrail.com. For donations larger than $1,000, reach out directly to thebobjonestrail@gmail.com to discuss payment options, Finger said.
A Class 1 commuter trail along Highway 101 isn’t new to the Central Coast, Finger said. In Santa Barbara County, she’s biked on a trail beside the highway near Summerland and another one near Carpinteria. In Ventura, there’s a commuter trail between Highway 101 and the ocean, she said.
“They work amazing at connecting communities, even though they are literally adjacent to the Highway 101 corridor,” she said.
Some property owners are still holding out, but the county will pursue the trail anyway
Ray Bunnell, who owns property along the proposed Bob Jones Trail connection, has been at the forefront of the opposition effort for almost a decade.
But Bunnell supports the new alignment, which avoids his property entirely, with some conditions that the county has not promised to fufill. In fact, the county sees no need for further negotiations with Bunnell, now that the trail will not be build on his land.
The new trail alignment will, however, run across a Caltrans-owned cattle trail used by six other property owners, as well as a parcel of land recently bought by Avila beach hotel and campground Flying Flags.
A few property owners have already settled with the county, but two others are holding out.
James Warren and Edward and Sharon Pollard have so far refused to sell a cattle trail access agreement to the county.
However, to use the cattle trail, the county has said it does not need permission from the landowners, only Caltrans’ OK as the underlying property owner.
The offers made and negotiations to reach shared-use agreements with landowners previously were courtesy compensations, Public Works director John Diodati told The Tribune.
He said if the county is unable to finalize the outstanding agreements in the next few weeks, it will end negotiations with Warren and Pollard and work directly with Caltrans.
The Pollards declined to comment and instead referred The Tribune to their lawyer Edwin Rambuski, who also represents Bunnell.
Now, the cattle trail offers the only legal access to their land, Rambuski told The Tribune.
The county offered the Pollards $1,500 in January for access rights to the cattle trail, which they declined, according to county documents.
The Pollards plan to take legal action if the Bob Jones Trail hinders their access to the cattle trail, Rambuski said.
“If necessary,” the Pollards will file an injunction in their 2021 lawsuit against the county “to prevent the county from overburdening the easement with the recreational trail,” Rambuski wrote in an email to The Tribune.
“The Pollards are not convinced that shared use is realistic,” Rambuski said. “It doesn’t seem like bicycle riders and joggers and walkers and a 30-foot-wide piece of agriculture equipment moving down the trail is a compatible use.”
James Warren owns the other property through which the cattle trail runs.
Similarly to the Pollards, the cattle path sometimes offers the only access to a part of Warren’s property, the property owner told The Tribune.
San Luis Obispo Creek also runs through Warren’s property, splitting it down the middle. Usually, Pollard is able to cross the creek to access the back half of his property, but when it floods in the winter, the cattle trail offers the only access to the rest of his land, which he uses for farming and keeping cattle, he said. The front of his property, his driveway and home are accessed from Monte Road.
Similar to other property owners, Warren was concerned that the trail would provide “an open road for the homeless to our property.” Now that the county has said it might not build a security fence along the trail to cut down on costs, that concern has become more prominent.
Overall, Warren said he supports the path but hopes to have his concerns addressed before it is built on his property.
“Having a trail that would go from San Luis all the way to Avila Beach would be awesome, it’d be great,” Warren said. “We’re for the trail, but we just want to make sure that all of our bases get covered when they start to use it.”
Negotiations between the property owner and the county have also been somewhat stop-and-go.
The county offered Warren $15,500 at one point, which included the costs of trail improvements like a gate and driving approach to his property, but the landowner instead wanted to arrange a different “fair trade.”
In exchange for access rights to the trail, Warren wanted the county to partition six acres of his property into a separate parcel that he could put up for sale, a lengthy bureaucratic process that would normally cost the property owner hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The county did not go for the proposal, according to Warren. He said he is willing to return to the table for conversation at any time.
Warren’s cooperation also hinges on the county accepting responsibility for any damage to his property or injures sustained by trail users, which the county’s attorneys declined to do, he said.
“The county wants to put the trail through there, but they want us to assume all the liability,” he said. “They have to take the liability for that.”
Assistant county counsel Jon Ansolabehere confirmed to The Tribune that the liability issue came up in conversation with Warren but didn’t recall it being “on the table” in negotiations as much as a free-flowing talking point.
“Generally speaking, the county would be potentially liable for any claims made by individuals who are injured using the Bob Jones Trail,” for example, if someone falls and gets hurt on the trail, Ansolabehere said. This kind of liability is applied in general to any county trail, he said.
What the county does not assume liability for is damage to other people’s property by individuals who are simply using the county’s trail, Ansolabehere said. In that case, the individual property owner would be liable, because the county cannot control trail-users’ conduct.
Additionally, the trail would have run through property owned by Thomas Reynolds of Reynolds Resorts. The county offered Reynolds $22,300 for temporary construction and permanent access easements on the property, but he didn’t sign the agreement. Reynolds then sold his land to Flying Flags.
As of Friday, the county was “in active communications and negotiations” with Flying Flags, Cone said in an email to The Tribune.
Flying Flags declined to comment on the trail.
