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The Eureka Police Department is ramping up enforcement on Hwy. 101 to address ongoing traffic safety issues — namely, fatal collisions — and reduce blight along the city’s main corridor. The initiative: “Operation Gateway 101.”

During a presentation at last night’s city council meeting, EPD Commander Leonard La France said the department has recorded 10 fatal traffic collisions on the 101 corridor since 2020 — five involving pedestrians, three bicyclists and two drivers. The department saw a “massive increase” in traffic enforcement last year after Police Chief Brian Stephens launched a department-wide effort to boost officer-initiated activity. Traffic stops are up by 241%, but the new enforcement tactic has done little to reduce collisions.

“Even though we had a massive increase in traffic enforcement last year, we only lowered our traffic collisions by about one to 2% overall,” La France said. “For a city our size, 10 fatals on the 101 corridor is not positive, so we need to change that. … We’re going to focus a little bit more on Broadway and Fourth and Fifth [streets]. Again, these areas where we have pedestrian fatalities, bike fatalities [and] vehicles that are having collisions.”

By increasing visibility in “hotspot areas,” the EPD hopes to deter speeding and reduce other “problematic behavior.” A new method the department has deployed is “rear amber deterrence” to improve officer visibility.

La France | Screenshot

“You’ll see officers driving around daytime and nighttime with their rear ambers activated, similar [to what] you see at the mall with mall security,” La France explained. “People drive by my car very fast — even though it’s pretty clear it’s a police car — and once you throw those rear ambers on, you quickly change behavior for people. It’s a system that’s worked in other areas.”

“We are not going to prevent every single collision through enforcement, but we don’t know what we don’t know,” he added. “The chance of preventing one fatal collision, that for us is a huge benefit.”

The department also aims to reduce blight through the new initiative by partnering with the city’s code enforcement team, public works and other community partners. That means tearing up weeds, tending to unkempt properties and addressing “general disruptive behavior.”

“We see our folks that CSET [Community Safety Engagement Team] works with … but again, their behavior is often unacceptable,” he said, referring to the city’s unhoused community. “It often creates a safety issue for the community, and especially for traffic. … We’re looking at how we can address these issues for either people living in the city and people visiting our city.”

Councilmembers Kati Moulton and Renee Contreras DeLoach attested to the uptick in enforcement, both noting that they were recently pulled over. 

Moulton asked La France how EPD officers will deal with “blight abatement” around town, like picking up trash on the city’s sidewalks. “What [are] the carrots and sticks involved there?” she asked, adding that there are some pushes in front of a shopping center on Harris Street that are “packed with garbage.”

“If we have the complaint, we’ll [send that] over to code enforcement to address, and then on the backend, we’ll see what’s causing the trash,” La France said. “Once we have that piece of it, then we can start the enforcement end of it to stop the behavior. … They really try to get voluntary compliance, just like we do, but once they hit that compliance route, they have their whole process to actually start addressing it from an accountability standpoint.”

“Fines?” Moulton asked.

Not necessarily, said City Manager Miles Slattery. “We could abate it and then bill [the private property owner] for the cost of abatement, [though] that’s a last resort,” he said. “The intent of this is to programmatically let everybody know that it’s not only a benefit to the city, but it’s a benefit to their business.”

Turning back to 241% increase in traffic stops, Councilmember G. Mario Fernandez asked what drivers were being pulled over for. La France said stops ranged from speeding to expired tags to a busted taillight. “If there’s a reason to pull you over, you’re probably gonna get pulled over.”

“If you’re doing 30 miles over the speed limit, you’re gonna go to jail for reckless driving. Hands down. There’s no reason do 60-plus in our city,” La France continued. “We give a lot of warnings out. We only cite 16% or 20% of people we actually stop, so it’s not very high. The people we’re citing are for excess, usually excessive speed.”

La France and Slattery noted that EPD will be in touch with Eureka Main Street and the Great Eureka Chamber of Commerce to improve communications between the department and local businesses.

The council accepted the report but did not take any action on the item.