Habersham safety-plan contract leaves county positioned for road grants, but follow-through remains unclear

Habersham County’s Board of Commissioners considered its Safe Streets for All Grant Safety Action Plan during an April 21, 2025 work session, with Chief Financial Officer and Interim County Manager Tim Sims briefing commissioners on a process that county records say led to Kimley-Horn being selected to complete the plan. The county’s issue profile classifies the matter as approved, while the April agenda passage itself presents it as an item for consideration and does not document a vote or other final action.

The plan matters because it is meant to turn traffic-safety concerns into a roadmap for future capital projects. County officials said the federal grant would help pay for a traffic engineer to prepare a safety action plan, which in turn could support applications for infrastructure grants to carry out solutions identified by the study. The plan does not itself commit the county to pursue those later grants or build any particular improvement.

According to the April 2025 county account, Habersham first applied for the Safe Streets for All grant in September 2022. The county said the grant was funded through the federal Build Back Better grant program. After that application, officials said an RFP was released in September 2023 and Kimley-Horn was selected to complete the safety action plan. The 2025 work-session discussion brought that earlier procurement and the plan’s prospective use before commissioners again.

County staff framed the plan as a practical tool rather than a promise of construction. Sims told commissioners that its value lay in helping Habersham seek future infrastructure funding for safety solutions identified during the study. That position preserves discretion for the Board of Commissioners: officials said the county has no obligation to apply for future grants, even though they described having the plan as beneficial. No separate position from residents, property owners, Kimley-Horn or commissioners is documented in the material here.

The county profile treats the safety-plan matter as approved as of April 21, 2025. Separately, the underlying work-session agenda language describes the item and the prior selection of Kimley-Horn, but expressly does not establish an outcome on its own. The record therefore supports that the county pursued the planning effort and identifies its intended grant-ready purpose; it does not establish which safety projects were selected, whether any later grant applications were filed, or whether construction resulted.

The next concrete public milestone would be a later county record showing implementation of the safety action plan, including any amendments, payments, project recommendations or applications for additional infrastructure grants. Until then, the central unanswered questions are what the plan recommended, how much the county ultimately spent, whether it sought follow-up funding, and whether any identified safety solution moved from planning into construction.