CLEARLAKE — What”s a city to do when there”s overwhelming evidence suggesting that children”s lives are at risk walking to and from school?
That question got a lot of attention and no clear-cut answer at the Clearlake City Council meeting Thursday night, when the council and staff revisited the safety issues of Pomo Road, especially when cars and school busses share the narrow street with grade-school students before and after their day at Pomo School.
The council ended up agreeing to get the process going to make Pomo Road a one-way street, but Mayor Jeri Spittler and Councilmember Joey Luiz voiced their impatience with the bureaucracy involved to turn a two-way street into a one-way street when the safety of children is an issue.
“I”d like to see this done before the end of the school year,” said Spittler, who brought up the issue at the last council meeting on Feb. 28.
“We just have so many resources, and it seems to me it”s just common sense to make that a one-way street,” Luiz said, echoing the sentiments of others at the meeting who wondered how expensive could it be to put up a few “one-way” street signs.
City Manager Joan Phillipe advised the council that it”ll take some time to go through the process of notifying the neighborhood and posting signs and some other hoops the city might have to jump through.
City engineer Bob Galusha told the council the process will take “three months or so — not 30 days.”
Galusha told the council that the Pomo Road safety issue wasn”t new, but a series of setbacks kept pushing it aside. Another problem, he said, was there hasn”t been an accident yet on the one-mile stretch of road that runs from Lakeshore Drive up and over a hill before crossing Arrowhead Road, where Pomo School is, so applications for grant money “wouldn”t have the merit” if there had been some accidents.
“There”s never been an accident, and that”s because people have been very careful,” Galusha said.
Bruno Sabatier, whose son is a first-grader at Pomo School, opened the discussion with a slide presentation to illustrate how precarious the situation is when two cars going in opposite directions pass each other on a road that averages 17 or 18 feet wide, and has no sidewalks.
When a school bus and car are squeezed into the equation, there”s hardly any room left for pedestrians, who could easily be forced off the road, or worse, stuck by a vehicle, he said.
Other members of the community who spoke in favor of immediate action included Dana Moore, director of maintenance for Konocti Unified School District, who said he was representing both himself and the school board, which agreed at its meeting on Wednesday that something needed to be done as soon as possible.
Terri Larsen, who lives across the street from Pomo School, urged the council to act quickly.
“I don”t want to see a child killed in front of my house,” she said.
County supervisor and Clearlake resident Jeff Smith told the council, “We”ve been talking about this way too long. The really simple solution is to make it a one-way street” even it meant “having everyone fend for themselves coming back (on other streets).”
In other business, Police Chief Craig Clausen recognized the city”s “employees of the year,” including volunteer Richard Moore; non-sworn employee, dispatcher Sherri Vannest; and sworn employee, police Det. Travis Lenz.
Clausen also introduced two new police officers on his staff — Chris Reagan and Trevor Franklin.
Rich Mellott is a staff writer for Lake County Publishing. Reach him at 263-5636, ext. 14, or at rmellott@record-bee.com.
