The Norman City Council held a special meeting on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, to discuss pedestrian crossings at Robin Hill Public School and a proposed ad hoc committee to review police and fire department needs. No consent calendar or public comments were on the agenda. The meeting concluded with a motion to enter executive session to discuss litigation and a potential property sale.
So we'll go ahead and get started with the city council special meeting for Tuesday, August 18th, 2026. We have three items on the agenda. The first one is discussion regarding the placement of pedestrian of pedestrian crossings at the Robin Hill Public School. We have Scott Sturritz, Public Works Director here to have that conversation with us. Absolutely. Good evening. Daryl asked me to come tonight and just kind of give it a little brief overview because there's a lot of concern and a lot of importance on this issue, so we wanted to make sure that we all were going the same direction. I'm going to start off with initially what was requested here by the school was rumble strips, not a crosswalk. So they reached out in May, I believe, and we went out there, did some evaluation that reached back out in July, and we're finally able to coordinate just a few weeks ago to go out there and look at it. This is a 50-mile-an-hour roadway. Rumble strips are really not a good solution at all on a 50-mile-an-hour roadway. You know what they sound like on the highway, that's what they'd sound like here all day long. So that was not a good choice. So when city staff went out there, they met with the school administrator, I believe it was the superintendent, and they also met with the security officer and started looking at what options were available. City staff proposed some solutions. Basically, they put in some extra crossing signs, which was an interesting use of those, but they're at other schools and lots of locations. And then they offered up using cones to kind of create temporary pathway across that would be highly visible to drivers coming into the school zone. So that was kind of where that went. And then after that, after that discussion, we felt that everybody had good communication on that, and that was what was initiated. And then the request was made to come in and put in crosswalks. At that point, we started looking at what crosswalks were if they were appropriate or not. We certainly agree with use of crosswalks. We think crosswalks are a good thing. We always prefer them at a signalize or at a stop condition because it's always a safer condition. A lot of places where we put those in, we wind up putting in some kind of cross stop control or at least additional warning lights and other items. In this case, this has a few extra little items. I just kind of want to put point some of those out. First off, it's a 50 mile an hour roadway when it's not a school zone. And even the Federal Highway Administration says you do not do mid-block crosswalks on a 50-mile-an-hour street. Our own policy that we have, and the written policy was in the memo that was sent out. Actually, says above 40. Well, it says the 85th percentile of the speed above 40. 50 mile an hour roadway, the 85th percentile is going to be well above 40, if not above 50 sometimes. Also, it gets close to the top of the hill. You kind of start coming over hill and you come down back down into it. Lots of concerns with it not being stop controlled with with children utilizing it. Um kind of a weird placement on where it is. You can kind of see it's the black box there. I got to kind of point it out. You can see it goes from a driveway to the middle of a big drop-off area, which adds a lot of ambiguity as to how they're supposed to travel, where they're supposed to go. Um really raises a lot of concerns when we're looking at it from a children's use area and parents who are dropping kids off and finishing their coffee or anything else. We always want to try to separate those two because it's always a bad uh it can be a dangerous situation. Um, and then the other thing that really impacted the decision making on this was how many of you can tell me where deer crossing signs are that you routinely pay attention to. Reason for that is because we get accustomed to that sign being there and no deer. The same thing typically happens when you put down these uh crosswalks and places where there's not always pedestrians, you kind of just start ignoring it. So there's a lot of concern just here on the safety from staff, um, and we felt and because of these reasons, uh a crosswalk at this location really is not the best alternative. Uh so again, we are we ordered the we worked with the school, uh, reported it back. Um, I believe they started using those, and we but we did agree that we'd continue to monitor, we we'd continue to take their feedback and that we want to continue to work towards solutions. Ultimately, the best solution would be something like you see here, and I'll walk you through this because there's a lot of line work there. Uh, but basically the solution would be to add sidewalks down to the this the stop controlled intersection, which would be the safe safest place for that pedestrian crossing.