BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
“The primary goal is just to make everything safer for everyone,” said Robinson City Manager Craig Lemin.
The City of Robinson now has $12 million in federal money to improve roads within the community.
“Lighting dark places up in town, getting better signage, all improves safety for transportation around our town,” said the City of Robinson’s Mayor, Bert Echterling.
The "Safe Street and Roads for All" grant is broken down into four sections — traffic signage, street lighting, traffic safety and the safe routes to school’s study.
“This grant is about $9.6 million, within kind services it brings the grant total up to a little over $12 million,” Echterling said.
The city reports a total of 76 collisions on Robinson streets in the last 10 years — nine of those resulted in serious injuries.
Stephanie Walker is a former Robinson resident who noticed many challenges while driving on local roads.
“It’s hard when you’re driving a newer car and you’re hitting a pothole or it’s dark,” Walker said.
She says she is ready to see changes within the community.
“Actually, that happened to me — I dented my wheel, they were working on the road and they had the orange cones so I had to move to the side," Walker said.
"Then I hit something on the side because of all the potholes and everything."
The city’s goal is to tackle many of the issues neighbors in the community face while driving.
“Some areas we could probably utilize more signage than we have available — lighting definitely," Lemin said.
"we have some areas in the city that are very dark at night, especially some intersections that are not lit."
West Moonlight Drive, Old Robinson Road and Highway 77 are some of the areas that the project will focus on.
Now, the city is working on paperwork and finding engineers to help decide what needs to be done with grant money.
“It will probably be some time in ’26 before anyone really sees much of anything happening on the ground anywhere,” Lemin said.
