Panetta, RTC announce federal funding for Highway 9 improvements

The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission (RTC), U.S. Rep. Jimmy Pannetta and other community partners announced an $850,000 in federal funding for the agency’s Boulder Creek Complete Streets improvement project on Monday morning, which the transit agency hopes will pay for a good portion of the project’s preconstruction work.

At a news conference at Boulder Creek Fire Protection District headquarters, Panetta spoke about Highway 9 and its importance to the county’s mountain communities as cars bustled in both directions along the main artery right in front of the fire department. He said constituents in the Santa Cruz Mountains frequently say they value the corridor, but also fear it.

“That’s where the Boulder Creek Complete Streets project comes into play,” Panetta said. “It is going to contribute to the community aspect of Highway 9 by providing more sidewalks, curb extensions, bike lanes and, of course, transit-stop improvements, all to make it a little bit slower of a highway and a lot safer as a main street.”

“If you’ve ever tried to cross Highway 9 on a busy day, you know why we’re here,” said Boulder Creek Business Association President Tess Fitzgerald.

The Boulder Creek Complete Streets improvement project is related to the RTC’s Rural Highways Safety Plan and has plenty of overlap. The latter seeks to identify crash patterns and locations and propose improvements to reduce serious and fatal accidents. The goal is to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2050 on highways in the county’s rural areas, including the Santa Cruz Mountains. The RTC approved the plan earlier this month.

The project focuses on Highway 9 and Highway 236, and proposes filling gaps in existing sidewalks, adding new sidewalks through the commercial area, installing curb extensions, bike lanes, center median islands and more traffic calming measures.

County Supervisor Monica Martinez, whose District 5 includes most of the major mountain communities, said the highway is “the backbone of our San Lorenzo Valley communities.” She said the intersection right by the fire station sees about 17,000 daily trips, yet the general safety on the road is lacking.

“Along this 1-mile segment between Highway 9 and Highway 236 through downtown Boulder Creek, we have more than double the collision and injury rates and nearly three times the fatality rate of other California corridors similar to ours,” she said. 

Steve Davis, project manager for transportation consulting firm Fehr & Peers, which worked on the Rural Highways Safety Plan with the RTC, previously told Lookout that more broadly, there were 1,262 crashes, including 213 injuries and 43 deaths along the county’s rural highways between 2014 and 2023.

RTC planner Brianna Goodman told Lookout that the Boulder Creek Complete Streets improvement project is “basically a more dialed-in, engineering-level facsimile of the Rural Highways Safety Plan.” She added that the RTC hopes the $850,000 announced on Monday will get the agency through most of the preconstruction work.

“This should get us fairly well into the plan specifications and estimates phase, which is the more nitty-gritty bits like exactly what we’re going to do with the drains or the cost to move the telephone poles,” she said.

The $850,000 complements about $2.4 million in 2016 Measure D funds that the RTC has committed to the project, but the project is expected to cost close to $11 million, meaning a large funding gap remains. The RTC will be attempting to secure grants to pay for the bulk of the construction, according executive director Sarah Christensen.

Goodman said she is preparing to apply for a Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, a federal program that funds regional, local and tribal initiatives to prevent roadway fatalities and serious injuries.

“If I were to win a Safe Streets for All grant this cycle, that would get this whole project through construction,” she said.

The agency is aiming to break ground on the improvements in 2028.

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