SLIDELL, LA — Saint Tammany Parish government leaders broke ground Tuesday afternoon, March 20, on an extension for the Tammany Trace in Slidell. The new stretch will be made of asphalt and will be about 1.5 miles long. The extension will begin at the current end of the Trace, where it reaches Neslo Road, and will end at the Camp Salmen Nature Park.  The work should be finished by this fall. “We have been working on this Trace for some years, and we have received accolades for the part that we’ve already done,” said St. Tammany Parish President Pat Brister.  “This is just the next phase, the next extension to take us from here to Slidell.” The project will cost a little more than a half million dollars.  The money will come from the state and a federal grant. Brister says the grand plan is to eventually extend the Trace to Heritage Park in Slidell.  She says each extension  provides more opportunities to run, walk, or bicycle safely and away from high traffic areas.  She also says, as the Trace extends farther into Slidell, it will provide opportunities for businesses that, as other sections of the Trace have shown, can set up shop and capitalize on the new traffic. “They have, all along the trace.  As we have already seen, the more we open, the more businesses that will come.  And that increases our economy as they do.  So I’m all about economic development,” Brister told WGNO. Plans to begin work on the final stretch of the Trace to Heritage Park could begin soon after the Camp Salmen extension is finished. “To be able to get on a bicycle or go from Covington and ultimately wind up in Heritage Park has been a dream that I had hoped to see,” said Slidell’s mayor Freddy Drennan.