The San Diego City Council is meeting all week to review Mayor Todd Gloria's proposed budget, as the city seeks to close a deficit of roughly $118 million.
On Monday, the council drew attention to one of the most controversial proposed cuts: the elimination of a team of traffic engineers dedicated to redesigning streets with safety improvements.
The Transportation Department's "multimodal team" is responsible for creating new street designs after a street is resurfaced. The redesigns can include narrower lanes, which tend to reduce speeding, as well as new crosswalks, stop signs and bike lanes.
Laura Keenan, founder of Families for Safe Streets San Diego, said the cuts would virtually halt the city's efforts to prevent fatal traffic collisions through safer street design.
"The mayor says his number one priority is safety, and if that is truly the case, he needs to also prioritize traffic safety," Keenan said. "This multimodal team is responsible for making safer streets in a very cost effective, efficient way."
Traffic collisions killed at least 50 people in San Diego last year and caused more than 5,000 injuries, according to city crash data. One of those killed was Andrew Olsen, an 11-year-old boy who was struck by a driver while walking to school in San Carlos.
Ian Hembree, advocacy and community manager for the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition, told council members Monday that the safety improvements would not have happened without the work of the multimodal team.
"Our city acted almost immediately to make cost effective improvements," Hembree said. "The multimodal team was instrumental in designing the quick and easy fixes at that intersection."
San Diego has about 2,900 miles of streets to maintain. The multimodal team has 12 full-time traffic engineers as well as a handful of students who work part-time. The elimination of those jobs would save the budget about $2.9 million.
Several council members spoke in support of the multimodal team, while acknowledging that protecting it would require cuts elsewhere in the budget.
"What that team does is really important," said Councilmember Stephen Whitburn. "I will probably want to either try to find a way to maintain that team or ensure that the work that it does can, in fact, be picked up elsewhere."
Despite the cuts to traffic engineer jobs, Gloria's budget proposal would actually increase the overall funding for the Transportation Department. The increase would pay for costs including higher employee salaries and the rising cost of asphalt and cement purchases.
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera suggested the elimination of the multimodal team may be more about politics than balancing the budget.
"This is what I'm concerned about โ that the mayor's office heard one too many complaints about bike lanes and decided to make a sharp left turn and decide we're just not doing them anymore," Elo-Rivera said.
