(playful music) - [Brooke] On September 15th, community members came together for The Great Gather Round.

This was Great Rivers Greenway's big celebration for their 25th anniversary and featured 1,500 feet of tables surrounding the Circle Drive of the Missouri History Museum, which is also one end of the St.

Vincent Greenway.

There were food trucks, activities, music, free cupcakes, but the real celebration is accomplishing 140-plus miles of greenway that connect the St.

Louis region, both physically and collaboratively.

- We have built with our community 140 miles of greenway trails where people can walk, run, ride a bike.

Give it up for your collective accomplishment of 140 miles and counting!

I don't know if y'all... - [Brooke] Great Rivers Greenway is a very unique system and model nationwide.

- It is.

To my knowledge, there's nothing else exactly like it.

- [Brooke] Emma Klues is the Vice President of Communications and Outreach for Great Rivers Greenway.

- To have 120 towns across three counties vote to create something that's a public agency to connect it all together, to our knowledge, does not exist anywhere else.

(bright music) - [Brooke] So let's go over that again, because one of the common misconceptions of Great Rivers Greenway is that it's a non-profit or an organization, and while they do have a foundation side of their work, they are a government agency funded by taxpayer dollars, voted into existence 25 years ago.

- I like the fact that we are building something that is going to be here long after I'm gone, that will be here for future generations.

- [Brooke] Todd Antoine is the chief of Planning and Projects at Great Rivers Greenway.

- When I started, I was employee number three at the time and hired by David Fisher, our first executive director.

It was David with his 30-plus years of running a major city park and trail system, me with my growing experience working at a regional agency, and then also Janet Wilding, who Janet was working at the time at St.

Louis County Economic Council.

So we all came in in the very beginning to really sort of taking our sort of government hats that we had and experience and putting the initial organization together.

- [Brooke] After consulting with numerous partners, agencies, and community members, they came up with what they called the River Ring Plan, consisting of 45 greenways across a 600-mile system.

- [Todd] And the whole idea was to set the vision.

And then in that, we started doing individual greenway plans.

So like our St.

Vincent Greenway was an early one, which is a very popular greenway from Forest Park up to UMSL.

- So I always tell people like, if you think you're at the Missouri History Museum and you're gonna go to the show at the Touhill, you're probably thinking about like three highways to get there.

- Right, yeah.

- There's the MetroLink, the Red Line.

So this greenway parallels the Red Line, so you can kind of hop on and off as you need to, going all the way up to the North Hanley Station.

- But you would never know the MetroLink was there.

I mean, this feels like you're in the middle of nature.

- [Emma] Yes.

- [Brooke] And that is one of the goals, right?

Is to have people feel more connected with nature, but in the city.

- Absolutely, in the whole region.

So we want people to have access to natural spaces, access to transportation choices, and whatever they need for them to live healthy, active, vibrant lives.

- [Brooke] But it's not just Great Rivers Greenway guessing or assuming what the region wants out of these trails.

Each project involves multiple partners, communities, and various opportunities for the public to give feedback.

- Community engagement is critical to our work.

It is the foundation of how we are successful because there's a responsibility as being good stewards of our tax dollars for us to be gaining trust and working with residents, working with folks in the communities about a potential project.

And so projects always have in the very beginning, you know, there's always the fear of crime about, oh, who's gonna be out there on these greenways and things like that.

But once we really got the system built and started building sections all over the three counties, and people start to say, "Oh, now I see what that looks like, and this is great, and I have a great experience on it and things."

It's building trust and understanding, and I feel now that we've been around for 25 years, there are people that are like, "When's it our turn to get a..." They want, you know, they want the trail that's identified on the map as the coming soon at some point.

- [Brooke] And one of those projects coming soon is the Baltic Creek Greenway in St.

Charles County.

We attended one of the last public forums for the project where you can see the adaptations to the plan based on community feedback.

- That kind of feedback and the feedback that we hope to get tonight can be very valuable for us to... - What I always appreciate, and we hear this a lot from residents and people on those on the committees that we talked about, or people that just go to our public meetings and whatnot, that comments that they made or things that they saw and the conceptual thing.

Like, they're like, "Oh, I see what I said back then."

You know, may have been a year and a half ago.

"I see it's actually been built and being constructed."

People love seeing that.

- [Brooke] Sometimes you're working with, I mean like just mile to mile, it's different municipalities.

- It might be tenth of a mile.

- Yeah.

- Sometimes we'll build a greenway that's maybe three miles and there might be four different towns and they may or may not know each other yet or have been collaborating.

And so the process of building the greenway really does connect the region together, even just by way of talking about it.

The day-to-day operations and maintenance is for the partner to handle.

So whether that's, you know, a county park system or a municipality, then they are the ones that might be like patching, you know, a hole in the pavement or fixing a bench or things like that.

But we know that with 120 towns in our region, they're not all the same.

They don't have all the same resources.

So we really try to jump in and help with our own staff, with vendors, with volunteers, with, you know, trainings for our partners.

Maybe they've not taken care of a rain garden before.

They don't have something like that in their community.

So whatever it takes, we want everyone, we think everyone deserves great greenways, so we wanna make sure that we jump in and help however we can to have a great system across 1,200 square miles.

(uplifting music)