By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
The new River Bluff Trails Park has already helped bring new people into St. Joseph, and now a new expansion will help to continue that growth.
St. Joseph City officials cut the ribbon to open the Bob Simpson Pedestrian Bridge, a pedestrian bridge that goes from the River Bluff Trails, over Highland Avenue, and to the Huston Wyeth Park
Stacey Simpson-Hill, Bob Simpson's daughter, says tourism and showing off St. Joseph was always special to her father.
"He loved drawing people to St. Joseph to share in the same history that he loved and was passionate about," Simpson-Hill tells reporters.
Convention and Visitor Bureau Executive Director Marci Bennett says it's been awesome to see the amount of tourism the trails have brought to St. Joseph.
"Have you driven around town on the weekends and how many cars do you see that have bike racks on them? That hasn't happened before, I live on Lover's Lane and I've never seen so many cars going by with bike racks," Bennett says. "We're pulling in tourism from all over the region Kansas City, Omaha, further places away, they're coming up here for the weekend and riding the trails."
While city officials weren't able to provide numbers, they do confirm the number of tourists has risen with the opening of the trails.
Bennett worked closely with Bob Simpson, who the bridge is named after, and says river front development and tourism were what guided him, and he would love seeing the new bridge.
St. Joseph Director of Parks and Recreation Chuck Kempf says he has seen a large amount of people coming from outside the city to visit the park.
"We don't really have any numbers, we don't really know what that is, but we do know that there are a lot of people coming in from out of town, we're seeing out of state license plates," Kempf says.
And Kempf says he's even talked to people in Kansas City that are interested in the trails
"We're a big deal in Kansas City right now, the parks departments in Kansas City all know about what we're doing, they all have questions, they all want to kind of know what's going on, and if they don't already have their own trail systems, they're trying to figure out a way to do what we're doing," Kempf explains.
Kempf says while development of the trail could have stopped before the bridge, using the bridge to connect the trail system to Wyeth Park is going to be big for continued development of the trails.
