Roxburgh Gorge Trail Charitable Trust chairman Stephen Jeffery and Clutha Gold Trail Charitable Trust chairman Rod Pierce have always said maintenance of the trails would be by a user-pays system.
Just over two weeks ago maintenance contribution tags went on sale at $25 each or $50 per family for a year's worth of access to both trails in order to help raise the expected $50,000 to $100,000 needed per trail per year.
At the official openings on Thursday, Prime Minister John Key said the Cabinet had recently signed off on a national governance body for the trails and under that, there would be the opportunity for trail trusts to gain government funding for maintenance.
He said trusts would still need to put in some money but, at this stage, it was not clear whether that would be the bulk of the funds with a government top-up or the other way around because it was hard to know just how much money would be needed.
He said initially, when the $50 million fund for trail construction throughout the country was announced, the Government said maintenance would have to rest with the trusts ''but we're taking a much more sympathetic view now''.
The news came as a bit of a surprise to the two chairmen.
Mr Pierce said it had also been mentioned by Deputy Prime Minister Bill English at the conclusion of the opening ceremonies in Lawrence.
''I couldn't believe it when I heard them saying it.''
He said he had not heard anything official but ''if that is the case then any contri-bution would be welcome''.
Mr Jeffery said he was aware there was already a contestable fund but this sounded like something different and ''anything like that would be a relief for us''.
The two trails, which collectively cost about $9 million to construct and received almost $6 million from the Government, had a one-year manufacturer's warranty, but in some areas that was about to run out and it could be another year before a better estimate of maintenance costs could be made, Mr Pierce said.
Mr Jeffery said any work needed on the trails in the first couple of years at least would only be minor, unless something unexpected happened like a lot of rain or an earthquake.
Something the Roxburgh Gorge trail trust had not prepared for, which became evident over the last fortnight, was the effect of Contact Energy's dams.
Due to a low lake level, floating jetties used for the boat transfers taking trail users across the as-yet-unfinished middle section, were found to be resting on rocks.
''We had to call Contact [Energy] to get them to put more water in the lake to make the jetties float ... we hadn't thought about the jetties not floating.''
The energy company had been flushing Lake Roxburgh, lowering the water level to below normal operational levels, which was what construction of the jetties had been based on.
Contact Energy hydro generation manager Graham Quinn said flushing, which was only done when there was a significant amount of water in the lake, could lower the water level by about 7m. It was done to clear sediment and mitigate the flood risk to Alexandra.
