The changes also come as the growth of smartphones and tablet computers has made it easier to browse and buy with the touch of a fingertip. That puts pressure on brick and mortar retailers, which count on holiday shopping for up to 40 percent of their annual revenue, to get shoppers into stores. It’s becoming an increasingly difficult feat: The National Retail Federation estimates that overall sales in November and December will rise 4.1 percent this year, below last year’s 5.6 percent growth. There are countless trendy detox diets out there, but I opted for the Master Cleanse. Sure, subsisting on spicy lemonade for 10 days sounded like cruel and unusual punishment. But unlike other cleanses that cost hundreds of dollars, this one was super easy to follow, and it was cheap. HamRadioNow had a booth in the ‘high priced’ exhibitor area of the 2017 Orlando HamCation (thanks to the generosity of Chairman Peter Meijers. And a cancellation by another vendor. Because I hadn’t arranged for a booth this year). LARA board Chairman Trey Casimir said the board has not chosen which of four paths to take for maintenance, which would include rolling the trail’s walking surface, mowing and brush trimming.LARA’s options include: purchasing its own heavy equipment and using its own part time maintenance employees; contracting out maintenance services; renting equipment as needed; or relying on volunteers.”Some of the farmers who live along the route are in favor of it and have equipment, so we might have some super volunteer who could help,” Casimir said.Purchasing equipment could cost LARA hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said, while contracting or renting could cost $2,000 to $3,000 annually.Now that the organization has secured a $350,000 engineering grant from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, maintenance is an issue likely to be taken up at the board’s February meeting, Casimir said.Managers at other rail trails in the state say their maintenance costs range from near zero to thousands of dollars annually, depending on the length of the trail, the type of funding used for maintenance and the organization that maintains the trail.Trails built and maintained by the state such as the Pine Creek Rail Trail in Lycoming and Tioga counties rely little on volunteers, having state funding and employees at the ready.The trail nearest the proposed Buffalo Valley Rail Trail is the 3.5 mile Robbins Trail in Montour County, considered the oldest rail trail in the country. It is maintained “on the cheap” by the Montour Area Recreation Commission, Executive cheap jerseys Director David Decoteau said, using volunteers, their own fundraising efforts and county funding.”We looked at federal dollars, we looked at DCNR dollars, but at the end of the day, we walked away from some of those grants because the other side of it was so high priced,” Decoteau said.He was referring to mandates that are built into state funding, including prevailing wage, administrative fees and in some cases engineering fees costing up to 30 percent of the awarded grant, all of which titanium cup sent the price tag of a recently constructed six stall, concrete block bathroom funded cheap jerseys china through grants from DCNR and the state Department of Transportation soaring to $220,000.Rather than get caught in grants that Decoteau described as a trap and to replace $10,000 cut from the Montour County budget, the recreation commission decided to get creative, first of all by using private money.A recently constructed bridge on the Robbins Trail was built for $100,000 in private funding and completed in a quarter of the time it took to finish the $220,000 bathrooms, Decoteau said. The commission has plans this year to use a $7,000 Cherokee Pharmaceuticals grant to build a new trail head.To generate its own revenue, the recreation commission for the past five years cheap nfl jerseys has hosted 20 events throughout the year as part of the River Towns Race Series, all of which this year are expected to raise about $100,000 for the commission, Decoteau said.LARA, too, is in the midst of efforts to generate its own revenue, having raised $35,000 so far toward a $300,000 capital campaign goal, Casimir said.In Perry County, maintenance of the Iron Horse Trail is negligible, forester Bob Beleski said.A simple hiking trail, Beleski said the 10 mile trail barely constitutes a rail trail and requires no mowing, only brush control, much of which is handled by volunteers.He estimated Big Spring State Park spends less then $1,000 annually to maintain the Iron Horse cheap jerseys Trail.In Lycoming and Tioga counties lies the Pine Creek Rail Trail, a 62 mile trail managed by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.The trail runs from Ansonia south to Jersey Shore through the Tioga and Tiadaghton State Forest lands.
