Have you ever played the game operator? You know where one person says something to the person sitting right next to them and so on and so till the time it gets around the room, what is being said is hardly recognizable to the person who started. Well that may be happening in one Benzie County Community. A viewer heard the rumors, but wondered what the truth was. The answer I found for him is the subject of this Fact Finder.

It sits over a little creek, on a little road, but don't let it fool you, the little bridge is the center of a lot of big rumors. They started with a few phone calls to the newsroom and then a few emails. With each one, more outrage over what this bridge cost and who paid for it. In a nutshell the rumor making the rounds was that the Benzie County Road Commission paid up to half a million dollars to build a small bridge on Aral Road. It's a tiny seasonal road near the Lake Michigan shoreline that kind of leads to nowhere.

That's the rumor. Viewers wanted to know if it was true. So we did a little Fact Finding for them and the truth is a little more in scale with this little bridge.

Kimberly Balke with the Conservation Resource Alliance in Traverse City knows exactly what the bridge cost. According to Balke, "the project total was $84,000. We utilized $76,000 in grant funds and Benzie County Road Commission provided $8,000 in kind match in the form of engineering." So not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but $84,000. Still a fair amount of money but most it didn't come from the local road commission. Balke broke down the numbers, "$67,000 from an EPA targeted watershed grant from the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa, $10,000 from the Oleson Foundation and $5000 from a conservation innovation grant from the USDA. Also with the Little Traverse Bay Bands that made up our funding picture with the road commission match we were able to get the site done." The county did put up just under $8000 ($7,788.96) for design and engineering services to have the bridge built, but replacing the old bridge could actually save them money in the long run. Balke explains "There was an exceptional amount of beaver activity at the site and the road commission had to send crews out every week at least once a week to clear the culverts of beaver debris. Now that we have a bridge that spans the creek width, has a natural stream bottom, we don't see that kind of beaver activity anymore so that is saving them a reasonable amount of time."

So did the old bridge really need to be replaced? Balke says yes and described the former bridge as well past its prime, "what we had before was 2 under sized culverts that were very old. They were constantly being blocked by beaver activity. They were too short for the crossing as well so that the road was washing into the stream with rain and snow melt, and the culverts were not adequate for the stream flow."

And stream flow and other ecological factors are pretty important to fish, beavers, and the people at the Conservation Resource Alliance. They were the lead group behind building the efforts to build the bridge, they wrote the grants, and oversaw much of the work. CRA has been responsible for many projects around Northern Michigan to restore natural environments and this was an obvious choice for their efforts, "otter Creek is a high quality stream, known to have Brooke trout populations and Aral Road is the only human disturbance today in that entire corridor, so by taking care of that one crossing we are taking care of the entire creek sub watershed and the Sleeping Bear Dunes Lakeshore."

Since it's in the lakeshore, some of our viewers wondered why spend a dime to even replace the bridge? They said it leads to nowhere. They're kind of right. I drove the entire length of the road and it leads to nowhere. No homes, no buildings, the kind of nowhere that's pretty popular with people looking to get away from it all. So why not just put in a footbridge? Balke says "we did consider that option but the Road Commission wasn't interested in cutting off access for fire management also we have a five mile hiking trail that went along Otter Creek, also there is more beach access on the other side as well. Its heavily used by people that love the park."