City of Rochester
News Release
(Friday, Dec. 27, 2013) – Mayor Thomas S. Richards today announced the results of the public vote for the “Voice of the Citizen” Budgeting for Public Safety initiative. The two-week voting period ended on Monday, Dec. 16 with a total of 840 votes cast. The Southwest quadrant winner was the Jobs for Life career and community education program which will provide job referrals and mentors for 30 adults and tutoring for 60 youth in science, technology, engineering and math. The project also includes seminars on block club leadership, civic engagement, financial literacy and home buying as well as a youth disaster recovery workshop that teaches skills in disaster preparation.
The winning project in the Southeast quadrant includes civic engagement opportunities like traffic calming discussions and implementations, neighborhood enhancement projects such as mini-Clean Sweeps, gardens, landscaping and community collaboration events such movie nights, health fairs and holiday celebrations.
The Northwest quadrant winner was entitled Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. The items to be funded in this project include tactics to encourage pedestrian traffic and discourage loitering, street drug sales and gambling. These would be high visibility pedestrian crossing signs, increased brightness of street lighting in select areas, outdoor café seating for rotating use among the quadrant’s restaurants, stores and delis, sidewalk plantings and hanging baskets and vacant storefront art.
The Northeast quadrant winner was the GIS Scholars Program. The VOC funding will allow the program to add 5 to 10 more students to take part in after-school training in the operation of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. The students will create a mapping project designed to assist with crime prevention in selected areas. They will collect data and identify crime rates through the mapping technology, create maps to plot variables surrounding crime such as property ownership, poverty, proximity to services and others. They will publish and share their results.
Mayor Thomas S. Richards dedicated up to $200,000—up to $50,000 per city quadrant—to be spent on projects that were wholly created and developed by citizens. The winning projects are scheduled to proceed to the implementation phase in January.
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News Media: For more information, contact Deputy Mayor Leonard Redon at 428-7163.