SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento officials agreed to pay $21 million in settlements after vehicle crashes on city streets from 2019 through 2023, a span during which the Department of Public Works repeatedly told the City Council that it lacked enough funding to achieve the council’s goals.

Most of the collisions that were settled — 17 of the 24 — occurred on streets the city had already identified as dangerous.

The city has been slow to overhaul the roadways that see the highest numbers of fatal and severe injury crashes, dubbed the high-injury network. While officials have called it a top priority, the department receives virtually no money from the general fund to improve infrastructure. Instead, public works staff depend largely on unreliable grants.

The crash settlements are not tied to the Department of Public Works’ budget. These sums are mostly paid out of a risk fund, which is fed by general fund dollars; a spokesperson for the city, Jennifer Singer, said that excess insurance covers portions of the larger payouts, typically those exceeding $2 million to $4 million.

And a settlement in itself is not an admission of negligence or wrongdoing. It may be reached to avoid the cost of mounting a full legal defense.

Critics said, however, that the sum of these settlements reveals a dissonance in the city’s infrastructure spending: In years that Sacramento’s leaders chose not to prioritize changes to infrastructure, they agreed to shell out millions to move past the claims.

“It should be very disturbing to Sacramento residents when they see the total amount,” said Isaac Gonzalez, the founder of Slow Down Sacramento and the vice chair of the city’s Active Transportation Commission. If the city prioritized investments in safer infrastructure, Gonzalez said, “People could literally not be getting hurt and killed.”

Settlements over police violence typically receive more public attention. But the city spent almost as much on traffic settlements during the five years reviewed by The Sacramento Bee: $22 million on police conduct versus $21 million on vehicle-related deaths and injuries.

“That’s a big number,” said Kiara Reed, executive director of Civic Thread, a transportation advocacy group. “It’s unfortunate that we’re always in such a state of reactiveness, and that we haven’t been able to move towards prevention and being proactive.

“Twenty million could fund a lot of improvements on our streets.”

Who pays for traffic safety in Sacramento?

Sacramento has attempted to be proactive about road safety, particularly over the last eight years. Research and other cities have demonstrated that the vast majority of traffic deaths are preventable, and in 2017, city leaders made a “Vision Zero” promise to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2027.

While the city does include such safety elements in its major road projects, documents show the funding for the Vision Zero program has been unpredictable since the pledge was made.

Meanwhile, the death toll has continued to rise: UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that more than 250 people have died in collisions on city streets in eight years. Vision Zero is overseen by the transportation planning manager, whose team is currently down to two staffers: her and her deputy.

Although most of the funding for big Public Works projects comes from competitive federal or state grants, cities are typically required to put up money to cover some costs of a project to be eligible to win such grants. Documents for the city’s Capital Improvement Program — the funding plans for relatively large-scale improvements to city property — show no more than $7.1 million was specifically budgeted for matching funds each year between July 2019 and June 2023. (No funds were obligated in 2018.) The 2022 and 2023 fiscal year budgets set aside just $1.2 million for that purpose.

Of the $19 million set aside for grant matching over those five years, only $5 million came from the city’s general fund.

The current year’s operating budget contains $46 million for public works maintenance services, transportation and mobility divisions, which employ nearly 200 people.

In mid-November, as he voted to approve language for a proposed state of emergency declaration over pedestrian and cyclist safety, Councilmember Rick Jennings said that the Department of Public Works needed “a dedicated and ongoing source of funding.” In each document laying out the five-year Capital Improvement Program published between 2018 and 2022, the transportation chapter informs the council that the lack of funds limits what the department can achieve.

“The missing piece here is that we don’t have general funds in the city budget dedicated to this,” Civic Thread’s Reed said. “What that tells me is that we don’t prioritize it.”

What crashes led to settlements?

The largest crash settlement — for $16.7 million over a collision that killed a grandmother, Qui Chang Zhu, and gravely disabled her then 6-year-old grandson, Jian Hao Kuang — was the second-highest settlement out of more than 100 for which Sacramento published an agreement from 2019 through 2023. The legal complaint explicitly said the road, Freeport Boulevard, was dangerous.

That case represented about 80% of the total amount of traffic settlements.

The city’s remaining 23 traffic settlements ranged from $2 million to $5,000. The majority of legal claims were resolved with payouts of less than $100,000.

The crash that disabled the little boy was between two pedestrians and a vehicle operated by a private citizen. The other 23 claims against Sacramento all involved drivers of city vehicles or, in one case, a Sacramento Regional Transit vehicle.

Road infrastructure was not cited directly in 23 of the lawsuits, but The Bee’s review found it did play a role in the collisions.

Of the crashes that involved city vehicles, 17 — 71% — happened directly on the high-injury network, and another three — 13% — happened just outside the designated high-injury sections of dangerous streets. Kuang was injured on Freeport Boulevard, and two other crashes on the same road led the city to spend $152,500 on settlements. At a single intersection — Fruitridge Road and 24th Street — two separate crashes cost the city a total of $45,000. Two separate crashes on a six-block stretch of Capitol Avenue as it turns into Folsom Boulevard led to a total of $570,000 in settlements.

“We’ve identified our high-injury network; we know that those streets have higher rates of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities,” Reed said. “Ultimately, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

The second-costliest traffic settlement was in the wrongful death suit that followed a crash on a high-injury network street. On Oct. 31, 2022, Denzil Ollen Broadhurst was riding his motorcycle on Bell Avenue in Robla when a Sacramento police officer made a sharp U-turn and caused a collision. The crash killed Broadhurst. The officer was charged with manslaughter and sentenced to community service in 2023. In August of that year, the city agreed to pay $2 million to resolve a lawsuit filed by Karen Waymack and Brenda Mendez, Broadhurst’s wife and daughter.

Bell Avenue has seen other crashes this year. Less than three-quarters of a mile west of the crash that killed Broadhurst, a pedestrian near Bell and Norwood avenues was severely injured Feb. 27, UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows. A pedestrian, Nelson Lee, was fatally struck at the intersection of Bell and Norwood on Nov. 6.

In that five-year span, other settlements were explicitly linked to infrastructure. In eight cases, plaintiffs raised allegations that poorly maintained pedestrian infrastructure led to injuries. The city agreed to spend $202,000 to settle those claims.

Critics question spending strategy

Councilmember Katie Valenzuela has called for the city to establish a “quick-build” program, as has Reed. At a recent meeting of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, Jennings — who sits on the SACOG board — praised such programs, saying they offer “solutions that can be designed with communities to make unsafe streets safe.”

“They’re quick, more affordable options to address roadway design,” Reed said. “They can create some immediate change, and they’re not necessarily intended to be permanent, but the idea is that you can work up to making those permanent improvements on the ground.”

Currently, the city has no established mechanism for implementing cheaper, faster improvements after serious crashes, focusing instead on more ambitious projects that often take years. Gonzalez, who was appointed to the Active Transportation Commission by Councilmember Eric Guerra in 2023, said the settlements were emblematic of the city’s flawed strategy on road safety.

“All costs are deferred,” he said. “We pay for it one way or another.”

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