by SARAH THOMACK
St. Joseph Post
Every year, the Northwest Missouri Coalition for Roadway Safety awards grants to help organizations put on roadway safety programs.
Northwest Missouri Coalition for Roadway Safety Chair Larry Stobbs says the traffic fatality rate in the area is about equal to the same time last year even though the amount of cars out on the road is down.
“There was a couple times I actually observed people racing… two cars and they were both going over 100 miles an hour on the interstate and just from talking to some of the troopers and some of the law enforcement agencies in different areas, they’ve seen the same thing,” Stobbs says. “We’re just hoping that by doing some traffic safety projects, particularly with our high school and our college-age students, that maybe we can get those numbers lowered back down to where we’re not going to have as many injuries or deaths.”
Stobbs says every year there’s a certain amount of funding that goes to the Coalitions for Roadway Safety in Missouri and their focus is to get various groups or organizations to do traffic safety-related projects. Last year, the St. Joseph Youth Alliance hosted a traffic safety day at the Civic Arena for high school students in the region.
“They got to talk to different people in the traffic safety field, whether they were ambulance crews or firemen or police officers,” Stobbs says. “They had a speaker that came in and talked to them about the need for not drinking and driving and wearing your seatbelt and those things and it was based on a personal experience. So we do a lot of educational programs in particular but some of those things take a certain amount of money in order to get done.”
Stobbs says due to COVID-19, things were slowed down at the state level, meaning they only released about half the money as usual to the roadway coalitions. Stobbs says this year they are limiting funding requests to 2 thousand dollars.
“We’re doing that just because the amount of money that we’re getting is so small that we really want to make sure that as many projects that can be done as possible happen in northwest Missouri," Stobbs says. "Because it’s not just St. Joseph and Savannah, it’s places like Maryville and Rockport and Tarkio and Bethany and Chillicothe and Trenton and basically all of the smaller communities in the 20 counties up here in northwest Missouri, so we’re just trying to fund as many of those traffic safety programs as we can with the available funding that we have.”
Organizations eligible to apply for these funds include schools, community groups, law enforcement, health departments, and others. Applications are due September 18th.
For more information, click here. To learn more about the Missouri Coalition for Roadway Safety, visit savemolives.com.