PENDLETON — Umatilla County is set to receive $400,000 in federal funding for the Safe Streets and Roads for All, or SS4A, program.

The award will be drawn from a $3.6 million total to be shared with, among others, the cities of Salem and Hermiston and the counties of Umatilla and Clackamas to improve road safety. The city of Hermiston was granted $280,000 through the program.

“We are in the process of selecting consultants so that we can begin the process of coming up with a safe streets plan,” Hermiston City Manager Byron Smith said.

The city of Umatilla is set to receive $139,840 from the same program, City Manager Dave Stockdale said.

“We will focus on what the plan is designed to do and to significantly reduce fatalities or other serious injuries on the roadway,” he said.

He said the city would like to construct sidewalks to and from the middle school and the high school.

“We don’t really have any sidewalks to speak of and we’re waiting to get that cleaned up,” Stockdale said.

Stockdale said his hope for the Safe Streets funding is to open the door to receiving further Federal Highway Administration funds. He noted the community had a fatality over the holiday season and other substantial traffic accidents during the year.

“Those increase as the population continues to grow and more people are traveling in and out of the city,” Stockdale said. “To stay at least one step ahead of that is going to be immensely important, to ensure a higher level of safety for those who are here.”

Umatilla County Commissioner Dan Dorran said the county had its first scoping meeting Thursday, Jan. 4, with the Federal Highway Administration to lay down some of the process to get the grant.

“One of the things we pointed out in our application is that rural roads in Oregon are the No. 1 deadliest roads in the nation,” he said.

Dorran said the county will gear up to provide crash analysis: “We don’t have much on rural roads in the county just because we don’t have the capacity for that kind of information at this point, but that will be part of the process.”

The county will begin identifying some critical areas of implementation, he said, and the grant also will allow the county to advance its digital mapping program.

“Safe roads have been critical to Umatilla County for quite some time now, and I’ve really taken it very personally,” Dorran said, “because of the nature of rural roads in Oregon and the lack of defined intentional safety measures, whether it be behavioral corrections or if it’s the straightening of curves in a road, or the ability to establish speed signs, anything and everything is on the table for discussion.”

Dorran said the distribution of federal funding under SS4A will be a three-phased program.

“First, there is the planning portion that we were awarded, and then you go into an implementation/scoping phase, if you get awarded that,” he said. “Then the third phase is the actual construction of capital projects.”

Dorran said the county is in the process of being awarded its traffic safety plan, which is updated every five years.

“So our hope is to be lucky enough to overlap two grant programs and make our dollars go much further,” he said.

Dorran gave highways 11 and 395 as examples.

“Safety programs we put in place on those highways, whether it’s speed reduction or roundabouts or whatever, tend to drive travelers off those roads and onto county and city roads,” he said. “It’s called diversion, and thatw diversion causes another whole set of problems.”

Dorran mentioned the recent Milton-Freewater meeting for residents to discuss safety issues related to Highway 11.

“We just had a meeting with the Oregon Department of Transportation this week to apply for some monies that are available for everything from billboards to patrol overtime, to some behavioral-type influences,” he said. “We haven’t nailed down exactly what we’re going to do yet, but we’re in the process of trying to apply for those monies working hand-in-hand with ODOT.”