Traffic management center plan scrutinized

COEUR d’ALENE — With a decision about a potential regional traffic management center on the horizon, Kootenai County residents continue to weigh in.

More than 100 people gathered Thursday night at Lyfe Coffee in downtown Coeur d’Alene for a presentation by a group called Stop Smart Cities in Idaho. The group’s website appears to have been created in March and does not indicate who operates it or who writes the featured blog posts.

“This is not a left or right issue,” said Jen Noelle, who said she is associated with Stop Smart Cities in Idaho. “It’s not a Republican versus Democrat issue. We should all be concerned about living in an invisible prison.”

Last month, the Kootenai Metropolitan Planning Organization board voted 6-3 to accept a report detailing plans for a regional traffic management center.

The center would be capable of observing the transportation network in real-time via video cameras placed at key arterials, with a goal of identifying traffic flow issues and allowing for coordinated interagency response. Similar traffic management centers already exist in neighboring metro areas, including Spokane and Boise.

The project has proved controversial, with many county residents speaking against it at recent public meetings, calling it a “spy hub.” Four KMPO board members have indicated they want to nix the plans.

KMPO canceled a planned Thursday meeting where the board was expected to discuss killing the project. Board chair Rod Twete said the meeting was canceled so the board could get more community input before making a decision.

Hayden resident Teresa Roth gave a presentation to the coffeehouse crowd on “intelligent transportation systems,” which the U.S. Department of Energy describes as the use of “intelligent” technologies to enable communication between infrastructure, vehicles and people to improve transportation systems.

Roth said she believes intelligent transportation systems do not exist to make safer transport networks, but rather to conduct surveillance on the public and centralize the data that is collected.

“These people are crazy as loons,” she said, referring to the people and agencies who work to research and implement intelligent transportation systems. “I’m not crazy. They’re crazy.”

Roth described a “bizarro, dystopian, scary system” in which the federal government uses intelligent transportation systems and “smart cities” to track and control the movements of all citizens. She said intelligent transportation systems are part of an “international plan to make surveillance cities” and are connected to “anti-car ideology.”

“They want to take away your cars,” she said. “I’m not kidding.”

Several elected officials were present at Thursday night’s presentation, including Coeur d’Alene City Councilman Dan Gookin, who is also on the KMPO board and opposes the traffic management center.

“We’re trying to solve the massive traffic, the massive waiting at the intersections,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff we can do that doesn’t involve the cameras.”

Gookin said he’s unsure how KMPO will vote when the matter comes before the board again. He encouraged the public to share their thoughts with the board and offer alternative solutions.

Also present Thursday was Rep. Tony Wisniewski of Post Falls, who has previously said he believes the traffic management center would be used to spy on the public.

In response to a community member who asked about the feasibility of refusing federal transportation funds, Wisniewski said Idahoans should cultivate a “just say no” mindset. He said he opposes the acceptance of federal dollars, pointing specifically to economic relief programs created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Now there’s an extension of the school lunch program for children whose parents can’t afford,” Wisniewski said. “We now have a summertime EBT card that’s going to be given to kids so they can allegedly eat during the summertime. We, as individuals, have lost our sense of personal responsibility. It’s not the state’s responsibility to feed a third of the students, almost half of the students, through the public education system. They’re getting education ‘for free’ in the first place, which means it’s coming from all your pockets.”

Twete acknowledged that many community members oppose federal funding but emphasized that the money to maintain roads and build new infrastructure has to come from somewhere. A proposed local option sales tax “failed miserably” several years ago, he noted.

“We’re looking for other alternatives,” he said. “We do have a problem with traffic. I don’t know what the answer is but we do need to keep things moving.”

The public can learn more about the proposed traffic management center by attending one of two open houses scheduled from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Aug. 3, one at the Black Bay Depot in Post Falls and the other at the Coeur d’Alene Public Library. The same information will be shared at both open houses.

The material is also available online.

Find a link to the material, as well as a survey, at kmpo.net/public-notices-news.

Comments will be accepted through Aug. 4.