Mayor takes on new role, invests in pedestrian safety
JACKSON, Tenn. — Mayor Scott Conger is taking on a new role.
Out of a national competitive application pool of candidates, he was 1 out of 10 selected.
In partnership with American Association of Retired Persons Livable Communities and Smart Growth America, Mayor Scott Conger, is one of the new leaders for the 2nd Mayors Institute on pedestrian safety.
Today, at City Hall, Conger spoke with us for a few minutes concerning the program.
“It’s a six month interactive class and 10 mayors from across the country get to participate in it. Mainly the first five or six. I think we do six that are all virtual and then we will have our last session which will be in Knoxville for two days,” said Conger.
These sessions will allow Conger to talk with other mayors and industry experts discussing pedestrian safety and networks.
“Yeah it would be one of the focuses that we’ve had for the last four and a half years of creating pedestrian safety and connectivity. It will help us just take it up a level on how we can maximize the funding that we have,” said Conger.
The other nine mayors selected range from Chattanooga to the West Coast.
Conger said that we are one of the smaller cities in the selected group.
“We have jobs, but we’re competing with people going forward. People want to be able to walk to where they want to go. They want to feel connected and to have a high quality of life,” said Conger.
Conger, who was involved in the mayor’s innovation design counsel two years ago, received an email from them suggesting that he apply for the program.
“We had to talk about our commitment to pedestrian safety, what we’ve done as a city and then why we were applying and why we wanted to make sure our citizens were safe when they walked around our cities,” said Conger.
He said that right now that he has committed one million dollars a year to their budget to build sidewalks.
“Hopefully out of that, we already have our plan for our network. We can look at something that we can focus on, whether it be a section of the city or how we can leverage the funds that we’ve already committed to really increase the output we have for those investments,” said Conger.
Conger said the sidewalk on North Parkway that’s in preparation to be built is a million dollar 95/5 state funded project.
The city will have to put in 50-thousand dollars
This project will be also be a two phase project, which totals up to 2-million dollars all together.
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