Plan drafted to install school-zone amber lights

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This article was published 11/06/2020 (1561 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Yellow means go — albeit slowly — for the City of Winnipeg now that a plan to install flashing amber lights in school zones has been drafted.

Chuck Lewis, owner of Expert Electric, has been pushing his plan to supply, install and maintain the flashing lights at no cost to the city for more than four years to no avail.

Friday morning, Lewis and Charleswood-Tuxedo-Westwood Coun. Kevin Klein announced the agreement had been written and would be presented to the city’s public works department.

“It’s a great agreement to get into with the City of Winnipeg and I’m really happy they went forward with it,” Lewis said during the announcement.

“It’s really about the safety of the kids, and the more we get out there, the better it’s going to be for the school zones and all the kids out there.”

Lewis’s plan will see his company develop and install two flashing amber lights at each school in the city on his own dime — a cost of more than $6,000 per school — and maintain the lights for up to five years. Additional lights, if needed, will be paid for by the city.

“We’re excited about the prospect of how this will change some safety for our children, but also on our residential streets,” Klein said.

Lewis has had this donation plan in place for four years, but met hurdle after hurdle in trying to get the city on board.

Klein said he isn’t sure why the city’s approval is taking so long, but after months of back and forth, he’s ready to push ahead.

“I didn’t think it would take this long, to be quite honest, but that’s the past; we’ll let that be water under the bridge now and move forward with getting these lights in place,” he said.

Representatives for the city said the public service department is currently working on an administrative report to present to the property and development committee recommending approval of the agreement, and the report should appear on committee agendas later in the month.

Now that a tentative agreement has been struck, Lewis will be able to start the ball rolling on both installation and a new safety initiative for classrooms across the city. Along with each installation, he plans to run in-class safety talks in collaboration with school boards, and will even host challenges at each school to compile safety tips for kids.

The rollout will take time, and it will be up to the city to decide where the teams start, Lewis said, but ultimately he is excited to see his long-awaited plan get underway.

“I think the citizens of Winnipeg are going to be super-happy, too. Nobody wants to have the feeling of driving through a school zone too fast… so I think that for everybody, once they start seeing them everywhere, it’s going to really make a difference.”

julia-simone.rutgers@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @jsrutgers