Making Newton a safer community goal moving forward

Progress is being made to make Newton a safe community as work continues to fulfill goals in the city’s action plan. Making Newton a safe community was the first essential purpose to be discussed at the last council meeting, starting the monthly update process for all four essential purposes on a rotating schedule.

“This last winter we passed an action plan after a planning process...which started last July and will go until July 2017. We are doing monthly reports on the action plan and the first one is addressing our public safety essential purpose,” Management Analyst Natalie Umsted said.

They city’s objective for making a safer community is stated as: The city’s purpose is to protect the community and fairly enforce the law, to educate residence and to provide information on safety prevention. To be well prepared in order to promptly respond emergencies and calls for service. To provide the protection of the environment and the lives of residence and visitors and provide a safe transportation network that is well-maintained.

“Through that, we identified several areas of service that were goals that we wanted to address in the next two years,” Umsted said.

Those goals are divided into three sections, enforce the laws, public safety education and respond to all emergencies. The goals for the enforcement of the law include reducing traffic accidents and reoccurring thefts and burglaries and reducing crime in multi-unit housing complexes. Working to improve the quality of Newton’s rental housing and updating existing codes and review the inclusion of other codes are also on the agenda.

For furthering public safety education the city will create a public safety task force to promote safety education, respond to all emergencies and monitor, record, evaluate response times and case closures. The city will work to replace outdoor warning sirens, increase performance based measurements at the fire department and create and implement employee emergency response.

Under the goal of responding to all emergencies the city will implement a community-wide master plan for traffic control, conduct an engineering study to evaluate downtown traffic and implement a five-year street maintenance program.

The city has already began work to implement these goals through several events and ordinances passed by the council.

“From June through September, the city led safety education to thousands of children and adults. We had public safety at Thanks With Franks, at Newton Fest and the Citizen Police Academy just started,” Umsted said. “There has really been a lot of outreach over the summer months about public safety education with the police, fire and public works departments being active at public events.”

With the recent approval of the Crime-Free Multi-Housing ordinance, work has started to reduce crime and improve the quality of Newton’s rental housing. Also the council recently approved the installation of two new warning sirens in the city.

A few key adjustments have been identified to the plan, Umsted said, including only two instead of seven warning sirens being bonded for in the most recent bond process. She said additional funds will have to be set aside in the future to pay for the additional sirens.

Also, Police Chief Rob Burdess spoke to city staff about additional indicators of accidents besides speed that may be causing accidents in town. After analyzing why accidents are happening, he found that other causes, such as distracted driving, may be to fault.

“This is a living, breathing document and we are not looking at this and saying these are our goals and we can’t possibly change these goals. As situations evolve, we want to keep evolving to meet the needs of citizens,” Umsted said.

Economic Development will be the next essential purpose to be presented during an October city council meeting. High quality of life and effective, efficient democratic governance will follow in November and December with the cycle starting over in January.

Contact Jamee A. Pierson at 641-792-3121 ext. 6534 or jpierson@newtondailynews.com