- August 14, 2026
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Charlie Hunsicker has been working for Manatee County — save for a three-year stint as assistant city manager in Clearwater — since Jimmy Carter’s first year as U.S. President. And it’s only a little bit of exaggeration to say Hunsicker’s been angling, in one form or another, for a trails system in Manatee County ever since then, in 1977.
Hunsicker, 73, the county’s director of natural resources, is tantalizingly close to his trails dream coming true.
A major win in that direction happened June 18, when Manatee County held a groundbreaking for Stage 1 of its new, yet decades-in-the-making, trails system. The groundbreaking was held next to the Lake Manatee Water Treatment Plant off Dam Road in east Manatee County. A $1.01 million project, the half-mile stretch of trail is expected to take about eight months to complete and will reach Rye Preserve.
Hunsicker hopes, and believes, the groundbreaking will be the start of something significantly bigger. He points to as much on a digital map on his iPad while sitting in a Manatee County SUV on an early July morning. As Hunsicker went over the map (see page 32), crews were working a few feet away, excavating the ground to make way for the trail entry point. Trails on Hunsicker’s map stretch east and west, toward the beaches, and also north and south, to Hillsborough and Sarasota counties, respectively. At total buildout, it would be 140 miles of trails. At a cost, officials say, of about $160 million.
“We want to put as many trails down on as many miles as our budgets will allow,” Hunsicker says. “I agree with (County Commissioner) George Kruse, who said we want trails in Manatee County, we need trails in Manatee County and we deserve trails in Manatee County.”
Kruse has certainly been a top trails advocate in Manatee County. Saying trail systems “have proven to be a great asset for communities,” Kruse notes Manatee’s geography, between counties that already have mature trails, will be a boost for the entire region, too. And on the cost, Kruse points out it’s a fraction of what it costs to build roads.
Both Hunsicker and Kruse, in separate interviews, say trails, done correctly, can serve multiple purposes: get people outside and moving while also connecting parts of the county people without cars would have difficulty accessing. Some people will use the trails, Hunsicker predicts, for recreation, while others will use them “to get from the western part of the county to the fastest growing part of the county, in the Palmetto area.”
Hunsicker envisions trails with people walking on one side and standard bicycles and e-bikes on the other side. He realizes that could set up some potential conflict as many jurisdictions statewide, including Manatee, are currently grappling with how to regulate e-bikes and other micromobility devices. The diplomatic and gentlemanly Hunsicker sees both sides. “The bane of walkers’ existence is electric bikes,” he says, “but we need to adapt to the fact that electric bikes are about to be an exploding industry.”
Outside Manatee County lies even more possibilities with the trails, in connections. Hunsicker, on the iPad, points to areas off screen that would be Waterside Place in Lakewood Ranch and Nathan Benderson Park in north Sarasota County. On the north end, beyond Manatee, lies the 45-mile Pinellas Trail and a multicounty path dubbed Florida’s Shared Use Non-motorized trail, known as the SUN Trail.
As Kruse and Hunsicker make their pitches for trails, they also credit Rex Jensen and his team at Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, developers of Lakewood Ranch. SMR has already built what Kruse calls “de facto” trails, with bike lanes and sidewalks along the entirety of Bourneside Boulevard, which stretches from State Road 64 to University Parkway. He calls that proof of concept that Manatee County will benefit from more trails.
Hunsicker says the first official version of a Manatee trails map dates back to 1998, though he had been mulling it over for years before then. Kruse, meanwhile, notes most current trails in Manatee County are loops within parks and preserves that don’t go anywhere.
Hunsicker says a major reason in the delay to get to a groundbreaking was a lack of a champion on the county commission guiding it. “No one ever prioritized it,” he says, or “really appreciated what trails can do.”
That was, until Kruse was elected, first in 2020 and again in 2024. Kruse, who has trained for triathlons on some of the few trails in northwest Manatee, sometimes with State Rep. Will Robinson, R-Bradenton, says his two priorities as a commissioner have long been affordable housing and trails.
While Kruse has been a key elected-official trails champion, momentum, says Hunsicker, began to build about five years before Kruse was elected when “people in Manatee began to say why can’t we have the same (great) experience on trails like we had in Sarasota on the Legacy Trail or Hillsborough?”
Asked what the biggest obstacle is to seeing more trails in Manatee County, Hunsicker turns his head to the right, smirks briefly and, as if it’s obvious, says, “money.”
That includes funds to build the trails and in some cases buy the land from various entities that own it along the planned trail system. And even though Stage 1 is underway, both Kruse and Hunsicker note how precarious the budget situation is, with a vote on the property tax referendum looming in November. Other funds come from the state and federal government, led by supporters like Robinson in Tallahassee and U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, in Washington, D.C. (Both Robinson and Buchanan are avid cyclists, and, notes Kruse, are leaving their elected positions shortly.)
Hunsicker, optimistic the best is yet to come for Manatee’s trails, also laments what could have been, at least in comparison to the highly regarded Legacy Trail in Sarasota County. He recalls a time when he ran Manatee County Parks and Recreation for four years, with a total budget of $22 million for all projects. Sarasota County, he says, had $60 million for the Legacy Trail. “I told myself,” he says, “by God, what I could do with $60 million for trails.”
