AUBURN — A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the entrance to the New Auburn hiking trail along the Little Androscoggin River is the first of public improvements due in the area, according to city officials.

The city is scheduled to officially open the newly improved quarter-mile walking path that leads to the Barker Mill Trail at 1 p.m. Monday with a news conference and ribbon cutting.

“We are ready, it looks great and people are out using it already,” said project manager Doug Greene, Auburn’s city planner. “It’s definitely time for us to finalize it and move along. It’s been paved for a month now, but we just wanted to make sure everything was manicured and ready for the ribbon cutting.”

Greene said the city will also use the ceremony to preview next spring’s New Auburn village improvements. The city was awarded a $246,000 grant by the Northern Borders Regional Commission last week that will help pay for the first phase of that work.

“It’s a great opportunity for us to kick-start all these things that people have been waiting and waiting and waiting for,” Greene said. “It’s time to stop planning, and let’s build something.”

Both the ribbon cutting and the news conference will take place in front of Barker Mill Arms, 143 Mill St.

The Barker Mill Trail reopened as a formal hiking and athletic trail about four years ago. It begins just behind Barker Mill Arms and comes back out farther along Mill Street.

Crews kicked off improvements to the entrance to the trail this spring, widening a sidewalk along Mill Street west of Main Street and building a small parking at the head of the trail, just south of Barker Mill Arms.

The work was paid for with the help of a $34,000 Recreational Trails Program grant from the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry and the Bureau of Parks and Lands.

Auburn pledged to spend a matching $8,750 on the current work under the grant guidelines to pay for widening, adding new crosswalks and benches.

Now the focus moves downstream along the Little Androscoggin River to its confluence with the Androscoggin River.

The New Auburn Village plan calls for constructing a park and trail area at the rivers’ confluence and redesigning Second Street to become a pedestrian-friendly street, lined with buildings on one side that could contain shops, restaurants and housing. The goals of the plan are to increase property values, bring in investment, attract new residents and create an urban, walkable village center.

Greene said the city needs to get permits to fill some of the areas, raising them out of the floodplain.

“It’ll do some really interesting things,” he said. “It should start with a new Riverway Road there, with a new formalized parking lot and then creating some new 7,500 square feet of newly developable space right along Mill Street.”

staylor@sunjournal.com