Maryland recently took back a $1.5 million grant for a high-profile multi-use trail after Baltimore officials failed to use the money for years.

The state added supplemental budget money in March 2021 for development of the Greenway Trails Network, a lattice of walking and biking trails snaking throughout the city that still has several miles of gaps. It is envisioned as a 35-mile network of multi-use paths to serve as both recreational facilities and functional connections to jobs, stores and more for walking, biking and other “active” transportation.

Planners intended to use the money along with a 2024 award from the National Park Service to purchase the rights to a roughly 1.5-mile strip of land in East Baltimore from freight railroad Norfolk Southern. It would fill roughly half of the gap in the trail network between Herring Run Park and the Canton waterfront, and would be developed in conjunction with the Red Line, a proposed east-west light rail planned to connect to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.

The National Park Service grant requires matching local funds, meaning it could be at risk now too.

The nearly four years of inaction that led to the forfeiture of the $1.5 million has baffled members of the City Council and some of the trail’s strongest advocates who, citing strong public support for the network’s creation, have been pushing officials for years to move faster to build it.

City Council President Zeke Cohen, a known supporter of the trail, pressed the head of Baltimore’s planning department, Chris Ryer, about the issue at a budget hearing last week. He called it “unacceptable” to lose any money, particularly for a project that should be an easy win.

Ryer said his team was given “no rationale for why it [state money] was withdrawn,” and he plans to go back to the state to ask for it to be reinstated. He and another planning department official said they’ve fixed some staffing issues that should prevent something like this from happening again.

Finding someone to blame for the loss of the funds is like playing hot potato.

“At no point has it been clear who has been responsible for the project as a whole,” Councilman Ryan Dorsey said. The trail network, he added, is “really important for Baltimore, but hasn’t been treated as such.”

Ryer said the environmental review process has been “onerous,” preventing the city from being able to approach the railroad with an offer.

Though Ryer’s department is responsible for the land acquisition, losing track of the money also could be the result of having too many cooks in the kitchen.

The transportation department has been involved. So has the planning department. The recreation and parks department handles sections of it within city parks. Rails-to-Trails, a national advocacy organization supporting such projects, has even lent a hand with grant writing.

But there hasn’t been much to show for it.

The last section of the Greenway to get built was a two-mile section of the Jones Falls Trail into North Baltimore’s Mount Washington neighborhood completed in 2020. Last August, consultants working for the transportation department unveiled a new proposal for an embattled section of the network in West Baltimore that was met with a plenty of criticism.

“There are some sections of the trail where there’s controversy, but not here,” said Ian Wolfe, a Greektown resident who is active with his neighborhood association.

His and seven other neighborhood associations in the Southeast sent a letter to Mayor Brandon Scott years ago in support of this section of the trail.

The Greenway within the Norfolk Southern corridor would transform the area by stitching together neighborhoods cut off from one another by a sort of industrial moat, Wolfe said. He called it “disappointing” to lose money for a project that had so much support.

“I just don’t understand that,” Wolfe said. “There are cities that have built entire [trail] networks in the time we have done essentially nothing.”

The grant loss won’t doom the acquisition of the Norfolk Southern corridor, nor the completion of the trail network, but will add some time. Getting the money back likely will require a new appropriation from the state during an especially tight budget season.

It’s obviously been weighing on Cohen, who brought it up a second time last week during the confirmation hearing for the transportation department’s new director.

While cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit have made “significant strides” in building their trail networks, Baltimore has struggled, he said.

“A project that had an enormous amount of hope and federal and state support has really floundered,” he said.