CROCKETT IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION
By Sonja New
CIA Accomplishments in 2025
In the past year, CIA activities have been centered around four areas: advocacy, beautification, governance, and community service.
Management of the CIA this past year has improved by the election of an effective leader in President Dale McDonald. Dale has been a CIA member for 30 years and is active in several local civic groups. He and other members of the Board of Directors have steered the CIA in increasing membership, redesigning its logo, setting up a dedicated website, and following through on commitments, such as establishing a memorial butterfly garden at the Downtown Plaza to commemorate the contributions of Fred Clerici, a founding member of the CIA and the Crockett Community Foundation.
The Plaza has only become more beautiful and inviting in the last year. Several work parties have spiffed it up, new plants have been introduced, and master arborist, Steve Batchelder, expertly spotted an ambrosia beetle infestation in our heritage red oak in the center of the Plaza. The oak was treated forthwith, and we hope it will continue to thrive and outlive all of us who currently care for and admire it. We recruited a neighbor, also a long-time CIA member, to monitor the Plaza, on a daily basis, and to keep all trash and weeds abated. The source of the leak in the fountain was finally diagnosed and fixed, after months of being out of service. The memorial butterfly garden was helped along by an almost $3,000 contribution from the Crockett Community Foundation, which wished to have a lasting, living memorial to Fred.
Other CIA projects in 2025 included two more Residential Cleanups, a Town Wide Cleanup, and cleanups of several illegal dumps. Local residents joined together to clean up what others had thoughtlessly discarded, and also to rid their own properties of detritus that lowers their property values, making a live demonstration of the adage that we are “stronger together.” Volunteers also joined CIA members in the goal of planting 1,000 daffodils along Pomona Street, for the enjoyment of visitors and residents. Thus far, about 700 have been planted and we are hoping for a glorious spring bloom. The Foundation assisted in this project with a mini-grant.
The goals regarding advocacy this year involved lending our voices to the county’s Franchise Agreement with Republic Services, maintenance of the medians in town, and meeting regularly and establishing working relationships with our District 5 Supervisor, Shanelle Scales-Preston, and her District Representative, Armando Carrasco. The two of them hold office hours regularly in Crockett, which the CIA attends and contributes to.
While we did not establish an Adopt-A-Median program as we’d hoped, we were able to advocate for Public Works to, at least, mow the medians twice a year. The medians are an interesting aspect of our hilly town, as well as the chicken walks and narrow streets, and we hope to be able to, in the coming months, bring more attention to and maintenance of these special areas. Public Works has also informed us that they plan to pave nearly all the streets in Crockett in the coming years. This is sorely needed, given all the damage done to our streets by a multitude of heavy trucks going to and from C&H.
A major CIA project this year has been to quantify the truck traffic in town. We posted four trail cameras at major dense spots and counted each truck passing through the various areas for a total of 21 days. What we found was quite eye-opening. During some of the heaviest pedestrian use (noon time on weekdays), these trucks, that cannot stop quickly, are travelling through these areas every four minutes. As many as 122 trucks come down the Wanda bypass and arrive at the C&H gate every day. Leaving town, they do not go back by the bypass, as planned by CalTrans when the bypass was built, but go through our heavily used pedestrian and commercial areas: south on Rolph Avenue and west on Pomona. In addition to the pollutants emitted, and the safety they threaten, the trucks frequently get lost in our residential areas, destroy the streets, spread dust and noise, and cut one side of our commercial district off from the other. The CIA Traffic Committee has completed a summary of our findings and will soon be discussing them with C&H, Public Works, the County, and other advocacy groups.
Lastly, this year the CIA has continued the special community activities that they have sponsored in the past. A Pancake Breakfast, the Pet Parade, Trick or Treating in the Plaza, an Easter Egg hunt, and town meetings about pressing concerns, have all been sponsored by the CIA in the past year.
In the coming year, we have already begun efforts to improve the speeding problem on Pomona Street. Residents tell us horror stories about the noise and danger generated by 1,000 vehicles travelling on that street every day. Many are travelling at twice the speed limit, which is 25 miles per hour. A long time CIA member, and resident of the street, is working with street engineers to devise traffic calming measures. Some of these include installation of speed humps, a potential four-way stop, and a flashing warning sign indicating each vehicle’s speed. We hope to continue to examine these efforts and offer our input. The County has already surveyed the residents in the affected area and found they are mostly in favor of the measures.
Other goals for next year center around continuation of the projects we’ve already started. Further development of the CIA website (crockettcia.org) is high on our priority list, as is increasing and invigorating our membership, continuing the beautification and cleanup activities in town, and continuing past popular town events such as community meetings, holiday celebrations, and popular public events such as the Pet Parade and Easter Egg Hunt. We hope to conduct more fundraisers, perhaps participating in the Art and Wine Festival as well as Octoberfest. We want to plant more daffodils, encourage greater use of the Plaza by residents, and advocate for quality-of-life issues such as safety, serenity, and clean air and water. We encourage all of Crockett to join with us in these efforts and make our home a better place to live for all of us. Remember, we are “Stronger Together.”