ATV master plan contract approved

by Edith Tucker

08/30/2006 - CONCORD – A North Country firm will draw up the master plan for the 7,200-acre ATV park at Jericho Lake in Berlin.

On Wednesday the Governor and Council authorized the Bureau of Trails of the Division of Parks and Recreation to sign a $68,950 contract with Horizons Engineering of Littleton to draw up the Berlin Trail Development Plan for the park that was acquired primarily for Off Highway Recreational Vehicle use, including ATVs and dirt bikes.

Horizons' president Steve LaFrance of Stratford assembled a three-man team — Walter Elander, Jon Warzocha, and Berlin native Don Bouchard — to work together on the plan, which will include recommendations for fees, camping opportunities, and a five-year trail build-out construction plan expected to be about 250 miles in length.

The former property owners of most of the park's acreage, Tom and Scott Dillon of T. R. Dillon Logging, Inc., of Madison, Me., reserved the right to harvest timber for nearly another four years. This means that the trail development plan will include working around his plans, taking into account loggers' need to use skid and haul roads. Currently logging contractor Forrest Hicks of Jefferson has a harvesting crew on the land.

The master plan is slated for final approval in mid-January, a date that will allow work to go forward as soon as the ground permits it in the spring.

When District 1 Executive Councilor Ray Burton learned on his daylong Aug. 17 State Parks tour that Commissioner George Bald of the Department of Resources and Economic Development had selected a contractor, upon the recommendation of a scoring committee, he had the contract authorization pushed forward on the Governor and Council's agenda to Wednesday, Aug. 23, from its original scheduled date of Sept. 13.

This shift gained the Horizons' planning team an additional three weeks to be out on the ground gathering information.