Committee moves Burrows bill on neighborhood traffic management after DPWT presentation and direction to staff

The committee voted 4–0 to move CB19, a bill sponsored by Council member Burrows to codify the Neighborhood Traffic Management Program (NTMP) and add timelines for county responses to requests for speed-monitoring systems.

Burrows opened with constituent accounts of deaths and crashes that prompted the bill. He said his office had compiled repeated, unanswered constituent requests and urged the committee to act. Director Johnson of the Department of Public Works and Transportation told the panel that as written the bill contained provisions that could lengthen vetting and improperly assign responsibilities for speed cameras to DPWT rather than law enforcement. "The way that the legislation is currently written would actually increase the time," Director Johnson said, arguing that the department lacks enforcement authority for cameras and that engineering study windows (seasonal traffic counts) limit when counts can be taken.

DPWT's chief of traffic safety, Hadi, gave a detailed presentation on the NTMP process. He said staff deploy traffic counters for 72 consecutive hours to gather prevailing speeds and volumes, score sites on engineering factors and crash history, and place interventions into three levels (level 1 educational measures; level 2 physical interventions such as speed humps if a threshold score is met; level 3 for more serious interventions). Hadi noted practical constraints: counts taken in summer or winter can misrepresent typical traffic patterns and installation typically occurs during the same construction season once community petition and council-member concurrence are in place. "For each hump... it actually lessens the response time by about 6 seconds," he said, explaining tradeoffs staff consider.

Council members pressed two core issues: timeliness (how to make the process more responsive to urgent safety concerns) and council confirmation of installations. Members discussed codifying the NTMP in county code with a manual under it, switching the council sign-off from a full-council resolution to a district council-member written letter as a faster approval mechanism, and requiring DPWT to consult the police department on speed-monitoring installations. Kate Mazara (associate director) said DPWT already coordinates a prioritized list of collector roads with police and that the department typically asks for a council-member letter after community approval.

Members instructed staff to draft technical amendments (explicit police consultation, clarifying that district council-member written approval may suffice, and language cross-referencing state law on speed-monitoring authority). With those instructions in place, the committee moved CB19 favorably; members agreed to review the drafted technical changes before formal introduction.