College Place consultants present safety action plan draft, outline project priorities and grant path

Spencer Montgomery, a consultant with JUB Engineers, told commissioners that JUB is finalizing a Comprehensive Safety Action Plan intended to make College Place eligible for Safe Routes for All implementation funding and to guide local safety work.

Montgomery said the plan uses five years of local crash data (2019–2023) for internal analysis but that the Safe Routes for All application process will require nationwide-comparable data through 2018–2022, which means College Place’s two 2023 fatalities do not appear in that application-period dataset. “The 2 fatalities that we have were in 2023. So during the time period that we're reporting for for the implementation grants, there's 0 fatalities,” Montgomery said, adding the team will “mention the fatalities in in our narrative” so the application provides context.

The plan, Montgomery said, documents leadership commitment (he cited a city resolution setting a goal of “0 fatalities and 0 serious injuries”), a safety analysis, public engagement, policy and process reviews, a prioritized project list and a strategy for transparency. “We've done a fair bit of safety analysis to identify trends,” he said, and reported roughly 430 public comments were used to…