Another recent fatal traffic accident is leading to a renewed push by city officials for the Safe Streets For All program.

City Planning Commission members recently heard an update from Jason Kulaszewski, city planner, on Development Department initiatives that are priorities for the coming year. One of them was Safe Streets for All, which has been discussed over the past few years. The planning process aims to reduce fatal and injury related accidents and to make the streets safer for pedestrians and drivers.

“I know that there was recently another pedestrian fatal accident over the last few weeks, so it’s really important that we get this project kicked off,” Kulaszewski said. “Our kick-off meeting with our internal stakeholder group will be next week.”

The internal stakeholder group includes the Department of Development, the Department of Public Works, the Jamestown Police Department, the Fire Department, YMCA, YWCA, UPMC, and some people from Jamestown Community College and Jamestown High School. Kulaszewski said the plan is to also talk with the police department and get the perspectives of the city crossing guards.

“Obviously they deal with some of these issues firsthand and they understand some of the issues relative to pedestrian safety in the city,” Kulaszewski said. “So that internal steering committee meets next week but it will really guide a year-long planning process where we plan to have outreach and public events.”

One such event is planned with the Prendergast Library in the spring. Kulaszewski said the overall goal is to improve pedestrian safety in the city, with the hope that the planning commission and others can help get the word out. It was also acknowledged that similar issues and parking changes near Love School were discussed at the most recent city council and public works committee meetings. Kulaszewski said he is looking to get feedback from people who understand some of the challenges in the city related to this issue to take it back to the steering committee, besides just the general data that is being collected. He added Love School has been brought up in these conversations multiple times and is something that would be high on the priority list for this project.

Kulaszewski encouraged planning commission members to reach out to him if they have any ideas or concerns related to Safe Streets For All as well.

Department of Development projects that were being worked on last year have continued over into this year, and Kulaszewski gave an update to the Planning Commission at their January meeting about where some of those projects stand.

Starting with the comprehensive plan, Kulaszewski said an internal review has happened and they have met with the CNS marketing team to pull together strategies and recommendations into a document. The hope is to start the approval process with the Planning Commission in the coming months.

“As part of the comprehensive planning process, it requires public comment and public review, and so we’re working with CNS to basically make sure the documents are ready for public consumption and we want to start that by reviewing with you all,” Kulaszewski said. “It will require full environmental review that our staff will be taking on for the SEQR and environmental review, and then it comes to the planning commission, and it also goes to city council for their review and to hopefully be adopted.”

The timeline for that Kulaszewski said is hopefully to have that done by summer time, because the second step to follow up to the comprehensive plan is the zoning update, which is updating the zoning code based on the comprehensive plan. He added he did not know what that would look like to present to the Zoning Board of Appeals, but that it might be helpful for them to get to see it as well, especially when they move forward into the zoning process.

The last update from Kulaszewski was a presentation on the Chadakoin Basin Activation project as an introduction. The project builds off of a previous planning initiative, the Chadakoin business plan, that began in 2021 to find a way to redevelop the Chadakoin Basin. The idea was to give the area a sense of place instead of being an underutilized industrial space that people did not necessarily connect to the city’s waterfront.

Kulaszewski shared some before and after artist renderings of the project that came through the project, and he said a main focus was in the North Basin. For the South Basin there were some ideas for commercial development as well.

“We’ve had a working group that has been meeting on this as long as I have been here,” Kulaszewski said. “And so we’ve been kind of working our way through.”

Kulaszewski shared some more renderings of the signature garden and other ideas for the project, based on feedback from the public process with the business piece. He said the group has been meeting to prioritize specific areas of this project. An engineering study showed most of the money the department is looking to spend on the project would be used in the earth work on the North Basin, so they then looked instead to the South Basin to see what more attainable projects there were there.

Kulaszewski went over some more plans for the South Basin, including conversations that have been had with the Board of Public Utilities, as they own some of the property down there, parking areas, kayak launching areas, signage to help identify the space, other potential draws to the location, what the available funding allows for at this time, the fact that the current phase is only phase one of the project, and a few other details before wrapping up the presentation.