Monterey bolstering its traffic safety efforts through a grant from the Tennessee Highway Safety Office to fund specialized enforcement and community education.
Monterey Police Department Grant Manager David Corley said the $13,200 covers reimbursement for traffic and speed enforcement, public safety campaigns, equipment, and travel. The department plans to use the equipment portion of the grant to purchase new laptops for patrol cars.
“The city gets the benefit of the overtime reimbursement, the department gets the benefit of the equipment purchase, and at the end of the fiscal year the city is out nothing out of the city funding,” Corley said. “Everything that they spent, it has been reimbursed 100 percent.”
Enforcement focuses heavily on speeding because most main roads in Monterey are state highways and the town sits along Interstate 40. The grant allows the department to maintain these operations without drawing from the local budget.
“We also locally look at our data that we have collected over several years and we know problem areas, problem times,” Corley said. “Ultimately, it’s not about writing tickets, it’s about public safety, and we want to keep people safe.”
The department utilizes a portion of the overtime budget for community education events during local festivals. These initiatives include seatbelt awareness and demonstrations using specialized goggles to simulate the effects of intoxication.
“This past fiscal year, grant year, statewide, the number of deaths that were recorded, if I’m not mistaken, we were almost a hundred less than the year before,” Corley said. “We want to continue to make that difference because although we look at statistics, those statistics are not just numbers. That represents people and lives that are being saved, and families that can sit around the table together because lives have been saved.”
Free inspections are offered to ensure child passenger safety seats are properly installed, Corley said. Officers have access to specialized state training for field sobriety testing and drug recognition.
“We do sober driving initiative awareness type events,” Corley said. “It covers a broad spectrum of traffic safety, but all of it with the main purpose and goal of preserving life, keeping those accidents, those fatalities down.”