RECEIVE presentation on the progress of the Salinas Valley Safe Routes to School Plan and the Participatory Budgeting process.

The Transportation Agency for Monterey County, Monterey County Health Department, Ecology Action, and the cities of Gonzales, Soledad, Greenfield and King City have partnered to develop the Salinas Valley Safe Routes to School Plan ("Salinas Valley SRTS Plan").

The just over two-year planning process will identify barriers to safe access to all K-12 public schools in South County cities and recommend infrastructure and non-infrastructure improvements. 

The planning effort for Greenfield kicked-off in February 2022. The team has reviewed existing planning documents relevant to safe routes to schools to ensure consistency with existing plans and projects.  In order to find out how community members currently travel to and from school and what the major concerns and issues are the team collected parent survey data, collected and analyzed crash data, and distributed student travel mode surveys. The team also visited each of the school sites to observe the morning drop-off or afternoon pick-up and note any infrastructure deficiencies and/or dangerous behaviors.  All of the input from community members and data collected were used to develop draft recommendations for each of the cities in the Plan. 

The draft recommendations were reviewed and vetted by the City of Greenfield staff, and then presented to the Greenfield Steering Committee, schools and community members for feedback and input.  The cities of Gonzales, Soledad and King City will follow the same process in 2023.

In Fall 2022, the team demonstrated several of the recommended projects along the 12th Street corridor in Greenfield, and through a participatory budgeting process, the community selected two projects along 12th Street to be prioritized for funding.   

Greenfield Participatory Budgeting

An important piece of the Salinas Valley Safe Routes to School Plan is a participatory budgeting process that is designed to fast-track funding and implementation of safe routes to school projects that are meaningful to community members.  In June 2022, a Greenfield Safe Routes to School Steering Committee was formed to assist in developing the process and engaging the greater community. Thirty-two community members applied and were accepted to the Committee and, on average, 25 members attended each of the eight steering committee meetings.

The Process:

1. Creating the Ballot - the Greenfield Safe Routes to School Steering Committee, made up of residents, students and community advocates worked with safe Routes to School program partners and the City of Greenfield to develop a list of projects for the community to vote on.
2. Town Hall Meeting - the Election kicked-off with a Town Hall meeting at City Hall on December 1, 2022 where the public had an opportunity to learn about the projects, ask questions, and cast their vote.
3. Voting - The public was able to vote for their favorite projects for a 2-week period (December 1 – December 15) at ballot drop-off sites or online.
4. Election Results - the winning projects will be announced at the March 14, 2023 Greenfield City Council meeting.

Election Results:

The ballot included 21 street safety projects, three projects for each public school in the city.  During the two-week voting period, a total of 244 community members voted for their favorite projects.  Of those 244 ballots, 132 ballots were in Spanish, 156 were paper and 88 were submitted online. 

After the ballots were collected and counted, the Steering Committee reviewed the election results and recommend to City Council that the following projects be funded to make the most of the $250,000 grant from the Transportation Agency (a full ranked list of the projects is attached):

Projects funded through the participatory budgeting process will begin implementation as soon as the Salinas Valley Safe Routes to School Plan is adopted in Spring 2024, and the City will have 3 years to spend the funds.

Originally, a community-based organization (CBO) was intended to facilitate the Steering Committees and participatory budgeting process in all four cities.  However, Agency and Health Department staff met with several CBO's that serve the local communities, but none were available to take on the facilitation role.  To fill this gap, Ecology Action stepped in to provide bilingual facilitation at the Greenfield Steering Committee meetings, and the Agency Board approved an amendment to their contract to allow for them to continue providing these services for the Soledad, Gonzales, and King City Steering Committee meetings.