Community Spotlight: From 53 Resident Requests to Safer Streets: El Paso’s Vision Zero Results
Renard U. Johnson is the 53rd mayor of El Paso, Texas. He took office on January
6, 2025, and is the first Black person to hold the office. Johnson finished first in an 8-candidate general election in November 2024 with 32.5% of the vote, then won the December 14 runoff against city representative Brian Kennedy with 56% of the vote.
Johnson was born in Chicago and moved to El Paso with his family at 7 months old. He grew up in Northeast El Paso, graduated from Andress High School in 1984, and earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1995.
Before entering public office, Johnson spent 14 years at his parents' federal contracting firm, where he rose to senior vice president of operations. In 1994, he founded METI Inc., a systems engineering, information technology, and natural resource management company that now has about 800 employees and 6 locations. Its contracts have included work for the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Navy, and the Department of Commerce honored Johnson with a minority business award in 2019.
His civic record includes service as chairman of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2009 and as president and chairman of The Texas Lyceum in 2017.
He has also served on the board of the El Paso branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and chairs the board of the Trellis Company, a nonprofit guarantor of federal student loans. He named economic development, property tax relief, and a shared vision among council members as his goals for the office.
On September 14, 2026, city staff presented a Vision Zero update to the City Council. Roadway fatalities in El Paso fell 36.1% from 2023 to 2025, compared with a national decline of 10.5% over the same period. The city recorded 53 roadway deaths in 2025, a drop of nearly 24.3% from 2024, compared with a national drop of 6.7%.
The council adopted the Vision Zero Action Plan in June 2023 with a goal of reducing traffic deaths to zero through infrastructure changes, education, and community collaboration. The plan follows the Federal Highway Administration's Safe System Approach, and city materials use the term "crash" rather than "accident" because it encompasses the roles of road design, driver behavior, and other systemic factors.
The Quick Build Program lets residents request low-cost improvements such as curb extensions, pop-up bike lanes, traffic circles, lane reconfiguration, and turn restrictions. A street qualifies if it is a paved, city-maintained road on or within a quarter-mile of the High Injury Network, which consists of the local streets with the highest concentrations of injury crashes.
The city received 53 public applications and selected 7 projects based on constructability, crash history, context, and safety concerns. A $10,000 grant will fund curb extensions, crosswalks, and signs on South Campbell Street near Lydia Patterson Institute, and the city also completed a curb extension at Guillen Middle School.
Larger investments are also moving forward. El Paso received a $9.9 million federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant for improvements along North Yarbrough Drive, Safe Routes to School programming, Vision Zero education, and quick-build projects. Another $5.8 million in bond funding will support Safe Routes to Parks projects, with construction expected to begin in summer 2027. City officials said the funding will allow El Paso to direct improvements toward locations identified through crash data and other safety analysis. The city is also updating its 2016 Bike Plan, with a draft scheduled for public review by the end of 2026.
Safer communities take more than funding. They take the right expertise to turn plans into progress. Fractional Source connects public agencies with experienced leaders who can help move critical initiatives forward. Book a quick call with the Fractional Source team.
QUICK HIT NEWS
Florida’s Board of Education approved statewide rules governing AI use in public schools, colleges, and universities. Schools must require parental opt-in before students directly use AI tools and provide non-AI alternatives, while K-12 schools cannot use AI designed to meet students’ social or emotional needs. Agentic AI must operate under adult supervision, with activity logs and a teacher-controlled shutdown option. Teachers also cannot use AI as the final decision-maker for grading, evaluations, or referrals, and districts and charter boards must adopt the guidelines by July 1, 2027.
Connecticut cities are preparing to use cameras that enforce noise limits. West Haven has amended its code to allow them and East Hartford permitted them last year, though neither operates any yet. Under a 2024 state law, a vehicle recorded at 80 decibels or more receives a written warning for a first violation, a $100 fine for a second, and a $250 fine for subsequent violations.
Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe has issued an executive order restricting the use of automated license plate readers by state and local agencies that receive state funding. Agencies must delete plate and vehicle images within 30 days unless they relate to an active criminal investigation, an emergency, or a missing person alert, and vendors must certify deletion in writing. The data cannot be sold or accessed for any purpose outside law enforcement, and cannot be paired with facial recognition. Every search must record the user's identity and a valid case number, and misuse can result in criminal charges.
An Afterschool Alliance survey finds that 92% of parents with children in after-school programs report that their children have access to STEM offerings, up from 6% in 2014 and 73% in 2020. Rural gaps remain, with 70% of rural parents reporting that computer science is offered, compared with 88% of urban parents. 39% of rural parents say their children take part two or three times a week, compared with 67% of urban parents. Only about 7 million children are enrolled in after-school programs, while nearly 30 million have parents who want them enrolled.
Colorado has launched a homeownership program to help retain teachers and other public school employees in high-cost communities. Schools to Home provides first-time buyers with down payment and closing cost assistance of up to 25% of their first mortgage, with average support expected to reach about $80,000 per purchase. The program has already helped 85 buyers and is initially expected to support roughly 125 home purchases. Colorado invested $10 million from its Public School Permanent Fund to launch the effort, as the state’s median home price reached $550,000 in July while average district teacher pay was about $78,000 last school year.
FOR THE COMMUTE
Incorporating Traffic Management into Your Disaster Planning (Disaster Zone)
Eric Holdeman speaks with Tom Kratt, Senior Vice President of Operations at AWP Safety, about why traffic management needs to be built into disaster and utility restoration planning before an emergency occurs. Kratt draws on 40 years in the electric utility industry, including five years overseeing AEP Ohio’s distribution operations for nearly 1.5 million customers. The discussion covers keeping access routes open, protecting work zones, staging traffic-control resources, and coordinating utilities, emergency responders, contractors, and local agencies during large-scale events.
RESOURCES & EVENTS
📅 The Connection Gap (Virtual - September 29, 2026)
The webinar will examine why digital modernization often remains fragmented across communications, data, and technology, including a gap between the 72% of public-sector organizations that say they deeply understand residents and the 32% of citizens who agree.
📅 K-12 School District Leadership AI Summit (Norwalk, CA - November 13, 2026)
The Center for Digital Education will bring together superintendents, CIOs, and other K-12 district leaders for a one-day summit on how schools are using and governing AI.
📊 Report Spotlight: Fiscal Survey of States 2026 (NASBO)
NASBO’s Spring 2026 Fiscal Survey finds state budgets entering a tighter period after several years of strong revenue growth.
INSIGHT OF THE WEEK
Hawaii promised in 2020 that every 3- and 4-year-old would have access to preschool by 2032. 6 years, more than $100 million, and over 100 new public classrooms later, the state has roughly 2% fewer preschool seats than it had at the start of the decade. 40 traditional private preschool sites have closed in 3 years, with directors citing lower enrollment, staffing challenges, and rising costs. A subsidy program for families earning up to 500% of the federal poverty level was introduced to help offset the loss of preschool capacity, but more than 7,000 applications were submitted, and only about half were processed by September.
