Millions for kids’ safety go to I-80 sound wall instead

It sounds absurd. There is an attempt to quietly allocate millions of dollars meant for kids’ school safety in Washoe County to an Interstate 80 sound wall instead. No one would have noticed if it weren’t for one guy on the little-known Washoe County Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) Citizen’s Micromodal Advisory Committee (CMAC). That committee is supposed to advise on how to protect vulnerable road users like kids, not direct money away from them for freeways. It gets even more absurd. After committee member Damien Cole raised the red flag about this strange reappropriation of funds, he was promptly asked to resign.

“The whole thing has a kind of fishiness,” Cole told the Gazette-Journal. Despite the pressure, he refuses to resign, committee members have come to his defense, and they are all on thin ice. We’ve heard that RTC’s in the north and south aren’t fans of their citizens’ oversight boards, but luckily Teamsters Union 533 worked with legislators Natha Anderson and Skip Daly to solidify the existence of these citizens’ boards in state law last year. But the RTC wrote their governing policy which says “RTC staff” can remove members with no vote of the committee. The committee needs your support right now, and at the end of this piece, I’ll tell you how to help.

Let’s talk about the “fishiness” of the proposal to use children’s safety funds for a freeway sound wall. The funds were originally for the Safe Routes to Schools Program to do just that: improve safe routes for kids to walk and bike to school. The funds are held in trust by RTC. According to the CMAC meeting agenda, the Washoe County School District couldn’t find matching dollars. So the RTC asked the CMAC committee members to approve using the money for an I-80 expansion instead. The micromodal advisory committee is focused on safety for bikes, scooters, pedestrians, and people who are disabled and ride the bus. Asking them to take money meant for vulnerable road users and put it towards a freeway where they aren’t even allowed is even more absurd. Raiding a school safety program for a freeway expansion is not in line with our community values.

This kind of attempt is part of a decades-long pattern of misguided choices by the RTC that put lives in danger, raised housing costs, ruined the environment, and incentivized unsustainable transportation. In this case, using funds for a freeway expansion instead of protecting students, we don’t have to look far for why the funding should stay where it belongs – with school safety.

According to the Washoe County School District, 21 kids were hit by cars near schools last year, one of them died at McQueen High School. Today, teachers are forced to spend hours of their valuable time every day being crosswalk guards, waving orange flags, and putting their own lives in danger as kids run around the streets in front of schools. My daughter refuses to ride her bike to school because it’s too dangerous. She talks to the kids at Reno High School who do ride, and they tell her that they are terrified. Kids should not be terrified on their way to school. I live nearby Reno High, and I see the students jumping their bikes off sidewalks to avoid fellow students who are walking, darting between parked cars and dodging in and out of traffic because there are no bike lanes. Even the Reno High School principal wants a bike path on Foster Drive and the road is wide enough to fit everything that’s there and a protected path – but somehow there isn’t enough money to get it done. Because kids ride this way some people treat them like terrorists. They have no other choice because our community keeps stealing funds meant for them and using it for other things like freeway expansions.

Here is the bottom line – choosing a concrete sound wall over children’s safety means more dead children at schools whose screams can’t be blocked by the RTC’s new I-80 sound wall. Even more horrifying, this deadly choice is subsidized by their parents’ tax dollars.

The Board of the RTC has recently become more balanced and focused on vulnerable road users. But clearly, the agency’s staff are still making really bad choices with our money that, if allowed to continue, will keep our children in daily peril. The Boards of RTC and Washoe County School District should put the children’s safety funds back where they belong.

It’s not too late to choose kids over concrete. The Truckee Meadows Bicycle Alliance has created a really easy way for you to write to local elected officials using www.BuildABetterBikeNetwork.com.

Tell them: “Take back the Safe Routes to Schools Funds from the I-80 expansion and use the money for its intended purpose – kids safety.”