IMBA Chapter Program, is it right for FORC?

[Geek]

Ok so just made a paypal payment to join forc so to jump into this discussion. Ive been riding on your hard work for years. So the higher ups of forc say money isnt an issue, awdsome. Yet in other posts slme have said working again aT LT would cut maintenance too thin. How dlss this merger address this. Does A great organization behind you offer manpower to build the epic tdack?

[DH001]

Ok so just made a paypal payment to join forc so to jump into this discussion. Ive been riding on your hard work for years. So the higher ups of forc say money isnt an issue, awdsome. Yet in other posts slme have said working again aT LT would cut maintenance too thin. How dlss this merger address this. Does A great organization behind you offer manpower to build the epic tdack?

We have two options for building larger systems: do it ourselves or hire a professional to build it for us. 15 miles seems like a minimum for a large system so I would guess we would want at least that much trail. Professional trail runs $15-25k per mile depending on the terrain ($225K-375K for 15 mi of trail [no structures]). To build 15 miles of trail by hand would require at least 7000 hours worth of volunteer labor and many other resources. To put that into perspective, we started building trail at Illiniwek in late 2008 and have invested at least 1600 hours to get a 5 mile system (we incorporated quite a bit of the existing social trail out there into the system which saved us a lot of build time).

Currently we do not have the resources to tackle projects of this scale. We need to grow our membership base (and volunteer labor pool) and increase our revenues to make this type of project a possibility. 501(c)3 status is a must for large projects and I am sure we will need some guidance from those who have done it before. I think the IMBA Chapter program is a step in the right direction.