The City Council held a study session on March 23, 2026, at 5:31 PM to discuss four agenda items and general business. Key topics included awarding a consultant for a comprehensive safety action plan, design of a signalized intersection, a trail license agreement with the hospital, and a new city attorney contract. No formal votes were taken; these items are expected to return for action at upcoming meetings.
We stand for the pledge, please. And to the Republic for which it stands. One nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the City of Sheridan March 23rd, 2026 study session. It's 5 31. We will get started. We have four items for our discussion tonight, plus one for general discussion at the end. So we'll just get rolling. Our first is discussion of award to SANTEC Consulting Services Incorporated for the Safe Streets for All Comprehensive Safety Action Plan in the amount of 249,922 and 73 cents. And with this is our city engineer Thomas Murnaud to present. Welcome, Thomas. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Safe Streets for All. This began in May of 2024. The City Council authorized the submission of a Safe Streets for All grants. So time had passed, change in administration. The contract documents had got changed and adjusted based on the change in administration. So it took some time for us to receive an updated grant, grant agreement and accept it. That was brought forward to you all in September of 2025 for exception of the grants. Upon accepting the grant in January, we went out to RFP with the proposals due in February of 2026. The objective is to develop a comprehensive safety action plan. It's a fancy title for identifying key areas with uh multimodal needs, concerns, adjustments. An action plan prioritizes and lays out what projects or things the city should consider for future implementation. And I'll get into a little bit of what that means. But again, it goes to looking at high-risk corridors and intersections, uh, the intersection geometry, ADA and pedestrian accessibility, bike lanes, signalization, stop signs, striping. It looks at all those items under that umbrella. Uh incorporate community and stakeholder inputs. So this comes a lot from the community. Uh there's quite a bit of public meetings involved to get that public comment and inputs to identify key areas. Is it areas around schools or is it downtown, uh adjacent to parks, etc. Those are all considered and hopefully will be generated through the public input process. And establish the framework for future safety improvements. So by doing a comprehensive safety action plan, the city then positions itself for future USDOT dollars that can lead to implementation grants. So that is to test out what these um improvements could look like and work with the consultant to uh create uh and lay out what uh a proper intersection geometry might look like and utilizing future grant dollars toward those. The overall goal of Safe Streets for All to significantly reduce and eliminate roadway fatalities and serious injuries. Again, looking at all the multimodal, it's not just the the vehicles, it's the the pedestrians, it's the bikers, all that. So this is our anticipated scope of work. Uh again, community uh community engagements, uh safety uh data analysis. So you're looking at your speed data, your uh your crash data, you're looking at the existing uh signalization, signs, striping, um the intersection and roadway design. We've been talking a lot about geometry, are the radiuses appropriate for the the vehicles that are utilizing those roads? What is uh that the crossing distance for pedestrians going through? Uh it looks at all those things. And then the action plans developed, it kind of lays out the priorities for that. We received five proposals. Um KL and J Engineering out of Gillette, Engineering Associates from Sheridan, Foresight Group out of Denver, Stantec Consulting from Sheridan, and Ayers Associates out of Cheyenne. They were partnering with WWC and Sheridan, so it was great to have a lot of the local firms being participating in this uh proposal. Um evaluation was based on experience and staff, qualifications, project understanding and schedule, references and past performance. The project cost is not to exceed 250,000. That was what the grant was awarded, the awarded amount to. So uh 200,000 came from the US DOT with the $50,000 match from the city from public benefits.