HAWLEY, PA — Who benefits from an added pedestrian bridge, or trails more clearly marked? More and better spaces for outdoor recreation gives the people who live near them more and better opportunities to recreate, but they also benefit local business through boosting or creating a tourist economy. 

That's the pitch of Outdoor Towns, a community planning initiative that's midway through development in Hawley.

Ideas for Hawley

On Tuesday, January 20, a handful of Hawley residents gathered at a public workshop to decide on the borough's outdoors priorities. 

A coalition including Hawley Borough and the Downtown Hawley Partnership, helped by consulting firm Eastwick Solutions, has been working for the better part of a year to gather ideas from the Hawley community. Outreach efforts included a community input meeting in May 2025, a public survey and a 'walkshop' conducted on foot through Hawley. 

Initial outreach resulted in a long-list of about 65 ideas. The project's action team, a smaller committee made up of community members, narrowed down that list to around 30 ideas. 

Participants at the January 20 meeting got to vote on their top priorities from that list of 30. Working off these priorities, the action team will choose 15 to 20 for inclusion in the final revitalization plan, which will itself undergo review from the public and from Hawley Borough. 

Prioritized ideas included enhancing Hawley's calendar of events, clarifying and color coding Hawley's trail system and constructing sidewalks from the local business hub the Hawley Silk Mill to businesses near the lake. (See sidebar for a full listing.)

The time frame for the action plan is three to five years, explained Steve Nelson, a consultant with Eastwick Solutions. However, he said, not all goals are created equal. Adding Hawley's trails to the AllTrails app, a popular hiking guide, would be a fairly easy lift; building a pedestrian bridge probably would take longer than five years, but finding funding for the design could be doable within the project timeline. 

Economic benefits

Consultants emphasized the economic benefits that were possible through making improvements to outdoors spaces. 

Eastwick Solutions specializes in "creating plans to help communities leverage their nature based assets—like rivers and trails and lakes—to help build an economy around that," said consultant Kim Stever. 

Pennsylvania, particularly, has a thriving outdoors economy. It generates $19 billion for the state, more than the natural gas industry or the warehousing industry, according to Stever. 

By promoting itself as an Outdoors Town, a community has the chance to grow its local economy through natural, word-of-mouth means, she said. 

"We want people to come into town and go to the coffee shop, do some antiquing, go to the different shops around, really bring back something to create those memories of Hawley. That's really the bottom line in a lot of this," she said. "The side product is all of these changes really enhances the quality of life and quality of place for residents."

For more info on the project, or to volunteer, contact info@visithawleypa.com.