Smithfield is set to receive $136,000 from the U.S. Department of Transportation to improve the safety of high-crash roads throughout the town.

The funding comes two years after the grant was announced.

In 2023, the town was awarded 80% federal funding through the Safe Streets and Roads for All, or SS4A, grant program for what Town Manager Michael Stallings described as a “multimodal safety and mobility action plan.”

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a June 10 news release that his department had released funds for 529 stalled projects, bringing the total cleared since Jan. 20 to 1,065, or roughly two-thirds, of 3,200 backlogged grants announced but not distributed during the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden. 

Those 529 projects include six in Virginia totaling $8.6 million, among them the SS4A Smithfield grant and a $5 million rehabilitation of the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry in Surry County. The SS4A zero-fatality program, also known as “Vision Zero,” was established to eliminate traffic deaths as a component of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, better known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Tim Kelley, a VDOT spokesman, said VDOT applied in 2024 for the Federal Transit Authority’s Passenger Ferry Grant to replace three steel sheet end piles on the Jamestown side of the ferry terminal with three clusters of three fiberglass-reinforced polymer pilings. 

VDOT was awarded $5,048,650, with the current total project cost estimated to be $6.3 million, Kelley said.

“These funds will be utilized to provide for preliminary engineering design and construction. These pilings are used to safely guide the ferries into the slips and are an important part of ensuring the reliable operations of the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry system,” Kelley said.

Stallings said the SS4A grant carries a match of $34,000, which will come from the town unless another source of funding is identified.

The $170,000 initiative in total “will have a town-wide overview of safety within the high-crash locations and systemic improvements to reduce crashes in these areas” and an “additional focus on key intersections and roadways will have safety countermeasures developed to reduce crashes,” Stallings said.

A 2023 USDOT map identified four fatal crashes on the Route 10 Bypass, one on South Church Street and one on West Main Street from 2017 through 2021.

“Within South Church Street, a more complete development of project alternatives will be developed to focus on continuous sidewalks and bicycle lanes,” Stallings said.

That goal aligns with one specified in the town’s 2022-revised Comprehensive Plan that calls for a more walkable and mixed-use South Church Street from its intersection with Battery Park Road to the Cypress Creek Bridge that marks the east entrance to the town’s historic district. The town has identified the same stretch of South Church Street as its preferred path for a presently unfunded 1-mile extension of a walking and bicycle trail intended to eventually connect Nike Park in Carrollton with Smithfield’s Windsor Castle Park. Isle of Wight County completed its 3.1-mile stretch of the trail in 2021.

Isle of Wight County received its own SS4A grant award of $171,200 in 2023 that will fund 80% of a similar $214,000 transportation plan for the county. The county is working with Larry Marcus, a consultant with Vienna, Virginia-based Wallace Montgomery, on the initiative, which is on track to be completed by next spring. The project was not listed among the six in Virginia with funding now available.

Duffy said in the news release that his department was “working diligently to accelerate the distribution of these long-overdue funds and address core infrastructure projects” and as part of the process, had eliminated what Duffy called “burdensome” environmental and racial equity requirements supported by the Biden administration, such as achieving greenhouse gas emission reduction and “access that reverses the disproportional impacts of crashes on people of color and mitigates neighborhood bifurcation.”

“Removing these requirements will save taxpayers millions,” Duffy contended in the news release, asserting that “the greenhouse gas reporting burden alone increased project costs and added months to the permitting process.”