Latest news with #2021BipartisanInfrastructureLaw
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Y-S goal: Eliminate fatalities and serious injuries on roads
'Unacceptably high rates' With a goal to eliminate traffic fatalities and serious injuries on local roads by 2050, the Regional Safety Action Plan (RSAP) was presented to the Yuba County Board of Supervisors at Tuesday's board meeting. Taking six years of data from the California Highway Patrol and local law enforcement, combined with information from a 'robust community engagement process,' officials have partnered with Sutter County, Marysville, Live Oak, Yuba City and Wheatland to develop a comprehensive action plan that 'addresses the unacceptably high rates of motor vehicle fatalities in the region.' 'Yuba County ranked eleventh out of the fifty-eight counties in California in terms of the number of collisions resulting in fatalities or severe injuries. Sutter County was right behind it at number thirteen out of the fifty-eight counties,' said retired Yuba County public works director Dan Peterson, who is acting as facilitator between the six entities for this project. 'The intent is to develop this clear, comprehensive safety plan that allows us to identify safety corridors where we need to address safety issues, and also help guide the selection of the safety countermeasures that we incorporate into our projects.' The project originated with the creation of the U.S. Department of Transportation's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which established the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) program. SS4A funds regional, local and tribal initiatives to prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries, with $5 billion in appropriated funds for 2022-2026. According to staff, the total budget for development of the Yuba-Sutter RSAP was $1 million, with $800,000 provided from an SS4A grant. The remaining $200,000 is shared by the participating counties and cities. Continued grant eligibility is a major driving factor behind creating the RSAP. 'This Regional Safety Action Plan positions us so we can continue to go after future grants,' Peterson said. 'For example, Yuba County will be submitting a grant application on June 26 to implement safety countermeasures…based on the findings of this Regional Safety Action Plan.' Safety measures were identified through the aforementioned gathered data from 2018-2023. The data used for the RSAP only includes collisions involving a serious or minor injury and/or fatality, said Adrian Engel, principal of the transportation planning and engineering firm Fehr & Peers. Engel said that in the six-year time frame, the number of injury collisions has remained pretty consistent at just under 1,000 each year across the region. About 150 serious injuries or deaths occur each year from traffic collisions in the region as well. The data revealed that broadside collisions are the primary cause of local serious injury or fatality collisions, with rear-ending also being common, especially on highways going into the cities. Unsafe speeding, improper turning, driving under the influence and pedestrian violations were also found to be frequent factors for traffic collision fatalities or injuries in Yuba County. The data was combined with information collected through community engagement. 'We created a safety task force composed of agency staff and public works, local law enforcement, the school district and local advocates,' Engel said. 'We met a handful of times to discuss the issues and use it as a steering committee for greater community engagement.' They also conducted four public listening sessions in Yuba City, Live Oak and Wheatland, and created a website where people could report locations where they experience roadway troubles. 'We like to get out into the community to understand maybe places they're avoiding that aren't showing up in the data,' Engel said. The team then identified several priority corridors in Yuba County for road safety improvements: North Beale Road/Lindhurst Avenue from Highway 70 ramps to Erle Road Forty Mile Road from Rancho Road to Plumas Arboga Road Grove Avenue from Hammonton-Smartsville Road to Shoreline Drive Hammonton-Smartsville Road from Simpson Lane to Avondale Avenue McGowan Parkway from the railroad tracks to Powerline Road Olivehurst Avenue from the Powerline/Chestnut roundabout to Lindhurst Avenue Plumas Arboga Road from Highway 70 to Forty Mile Road Simpson Lane from East 10th Street to Hammonton-Smartsville Road Highway 65 from the Highway 70 divide to Olive Avenue Highway 70 from Yuba River to Seventh Avenue Countermeasures implemented will be based on each corridor's specific issues and needs. 'The plan will start to address these issues at a high level, as well as identifying some corridors at a more specific level,' Engel said. 'Many of the countermeasures that we're looking at in terms of the toolbox will look at changing signal timing, increasing the all-red phase and adding dilemma zone detection.' Signs, road striping, public education and more are included in the RSAP as well, added Peterson. North Beale Road is set to be the first for improvements. Engel said the other corridors will be addressed as they finalize the plan and secure grant funding. 'The safety planning work for all six agencies is happening concurrently,' Engel said. 'We will have a draft plan for the entire region in the fall.' Staff will present the RSAP to the board again at the next meeting with a recommendation to adopt it. 'We acknowledge that this is going to be a long-term effort, but it's definitely going to be of value when we go through and prioritize projects and actually scope those projects to incorporate safety countermeasures in the future,' Peterson said.
Los Angeles Times
10-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
DOGE and Trump quash a Klamath River basin comeback
The Trump administration ruined what should have been a good spring in the Klamath River basin. By abruptly laying off federal personnel and freezing payments for already authorized programs and projects, the administration replaced a budding sense of hopefulness in the basin with fear and uncertainty, and tore at fragile bonds years in the making among upper basin ranchers and farmers, federal, state and local governments, nonprofits and Native tribes. In a region where conflict over water has simmered for the last quarter-century, trust was already fragile. Now it is smashed to smithereens. Through the 21st century the Klamath has lurched from crisis to crisis, usually related to the extended drought that has hovered over the basin most of that time. What distinguishes the current debacle is that it has no relation to natural phenomena. It's entirely man-made — and entirely unnecessary. Out of disregard for the needs of ordinary Americans and an apparent desire to eviscerate whatever was championed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump has allowed Elon Musk to take a blunt hatchet to federal expenditures. The result in the Klamath — where voters overwhelmingly chose Trump in 2024 — is that many people feel fearful and betrayed. Early last October, the world's largest dam removal project, entailing the dismantling of four obsolescent Klamath River hydroelectric dams that had blocked salmon from the upper basin since 1918, was completed. More than 6,000 salmon — a number that far exceeded biologists' predictions — swam upstream past the demolished dams over the next two months. Lower basin tribes, whose cultures and diets revolve around salmon, celebrated. In conjunction with dam removal, tribes and government agencies launched programs to restore the environmentally ravaged river after a century of misguided federal water management. In the upper basin, where drought-induced water scarcity had led to scant allocations to farmers and ranchers, farmers got support from federal programs that promoted increased water efficiency and improved the river system's dreadful water quality. Many of the efforts were funded by the Biden administration's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Typically, an environmental nonprofit or a local government body applied for funding to carry out, say, a wetlands restoration contract or upgrades to farmers' irrigation equipment. When the work was completed, its federal backer was alerted, the funds were released, and the contractors paid and farmers reimbursed. In a matter of days, Trump and Musk broke the system. Now the nonprofit or agency isn't able to collect promised funds, and contractors and landowners are left with debts for labor or purchases they've paid for, in amounts up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some nonprofits are laying off workers and are wondering whether they will survive. Federal agencies' staffs have been reduced, and some agencies may be forced to move out of the basin entirely. Funding recipients usually found out about the cuts without a hint of warning. Larry Nicholson is executive director of the Upper Klamath Basin Ag Collaborative, a group of farmers, ranchers, government officials and scientists that has been planning the restoration of a key portion of the river. Having received a $6-million grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the collaborative has carried out about 40% of planning for the project, but in February, Nicholson said his accountant called him to tell him that the federal government had stopped making deposits. 'I never got an email,' he said. 'I never got a phone call. I never got any forewarning. Consequently, I have probably in excess of $250,000 in invoices for work that is already done that I can't pay.' Now the planning is shut down, and Nicholson isn't sure it will continue. Little bombs of debt like this have been exploding all over the basin. Another example: The Klamath is highly vulnerable to wildfire, and in 2021 it experienced the Bootleg fire, the nation's largest wildfire that year. Yet Musk's Department of Government Efficiency blithely laid off U.S. Forest Service workers who were thinning forests and reducing vegetation around homes and other structures. As a result, fire 'hardening' in some areas has entirely stopped, and early-fire-detection procedures are weakened. And this: Some federal funding for the basin's tribes also has been frozen, leaving tribal leaders to wonder whether they will have to shut down crucial departments such as those that track and support salmon recovery. The question remains: Why? Whatever savings may be realized from firing federal workers and freezing funds will almost certainly be matched by the costs of abandoning projects before they're completed, and by spreading so much uncertainty that local businesses, tribes and government agencies remain paralyzed. These cuts have nothing to do with rooting out fraud and waste, which cannot have been discovered by the DOGE slash-and-burn cost-cutters. As former Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner said recently, a genuine investigation into federal fraud and waste takes about a year, not a few days. Back on Feb. 28, Musk told Joe Rogan and his podcast listeners that 'the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,' as if empathy were something else to root out, like river restoration programs. It's an unusually revealing comment in the context of the Klamath, where the administration's astonishing lack of empathy is now on garish display. Jacques Leslie is the author of 'Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment.' He is at work on a book on the Klamath basin.
