Thumbnail photo: District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard said that newly-enacted AB 1014 will increase safety in Smith River, Gasquet and Hiouchi. | Photo by Akampfer via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons License.
A Del Norte County-sponsored assembly bill that aims to tame traffic speeding through rural communities gained the California governor’s signature earlier this month.
District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard on Tuesday thanked Assemblyman Chris Rogers for taking Assembly Bill 1014 through the legislative process and before Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed it into law on Oct. 3.
Howard also urged his constituents to look toward a pilot project taking place in Orick, which involves crews putting up “large flexible cones” in the center turn lane to prevent people from using it to pass slower vehicles.
“That’s exactly what we’re seeing in the townsite of Gasquet also,” he said. “People come into the town of Gasquet off the four-lane stretch (of U.S. 199). They’re doing 65-plus mph and they hit slow traffic and they want to pass people in the middle of the lane.”
Advocating for AB 1014 marks the first time Del Norte County actively participated in the state legislative process from start to finish, Howard told Redwood Voice Community News.
The supervisor, whose district includes Hiouchi, Gasquet and Smith River, asked his colleagues in January to add the issue of unsafe speed limits through those communities to their 2025 legislative platform. He and his colleagues agreed to sponsor AB 1014 in February, about two months after its author took his District 2 assembly seat for the first time.
In June, Howard said he and other county officials lobbied for the assembly bill in Sacramento.
On Tuesday, Howard told a constituent that the new law means the speed limit through Hiouchi could be reduced to 45 mph. However he later told Redwood Voice that “everything could be impacted now.”
“We don’t need these restrictions based on the average speed,” Howard said, referring to the state’s previous criteria of using the average speed 85 percent of motorists were traveling at to set speed limits. “We could evaluate it differently than we ever had before.”
AB 1014 grants Caltrans the authority to reduce speed limits by up to 10 mph on stretches of the state highway system that are risky to pedestrians, cyclists, children, seniors and individuals with disabilities.
The new law also creates a criteria for establishing safety corridors and requires Caltrans to consider local safety concerns when setting speed limits in rural and recreational areas.
Local authorities are also granted the ability to set 20- to 25-mph speed limits “under certain circumstances” and on “specified highways,” according to the text.
This doesn’t apply to Del Norte County since Caltrans owns highways 199 and 101, Howard said, but the law gives local agencies the ability to have more input.
“It’s supposed to be a collaborative process with input from the community,” he said, adding that this could come from the Del Norte Local Transportation Commission, Del Norte County or even Crescent City. “Basically (it would) inform Caltrans that we’ve got issues here and we can work toward a study that now creates that reduction in speed.”
In the bill’s final text, Rogers specifically referred to U.S. 199, the Smith River National Recreation Area, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park and the communities of Hiouchi and Gasquet. He states that the unique conditions on U.S. 199 “in terms of visitor-serving and recreational activities” hadn’t been properly accounted for in current laws and, as a result, posed a risk to pedestrians.
According to Howard, Del Norte County officials have had a long-standing collaborative relationship with Caltrans District 1 representatives, particularly when it came to speed limits on the state highways through the area. In one instance, he said, Caltrans had been reluctant to post a new 55 mph speed limit that was the result of a speed study conducted through Gasquet.
“Del Norte is going to have input, which is what we’ve always wanted,” he said. “These are long-standing issues and I’m happy now we’re going to gain some traction and not have to battle these ridiculously created speed laws.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Howard’s colleague, District 1 Supervisor Darrin Short, congratulated him, saying that his advocacy was largely responsible for the assembly bill making its way to Newsom’s desk for a signature.
“I know you advocated for that with our new (assemblyman),” Short told Howard. “Having him be a Democrat and you be a Republican and show up on the same floor and advocate for the same thing was what brought (lawmakers) all together. I’m glad to see that it got signed.”
