Connect South Merced
Organization: City of Merced
Funding Request: $499,725.60
Project Summary
Connect South Merced is a community-led transportation safety planning project by the City of Merced, designed to build local capacity while developing actionable, community-informed planning concepts for priority corridors in South Merced. The City’s vision is to ensure these historically disinvested neighborhoods are better equipped to shape transportation decisions over the long term by educating residents and partners on planning processes and giving them direct influence over corridor concepts.
The project’s organizing mechanism is a South Merced Collaborative Governance Structure (CGS) that guides inclusive engagement and shared decision-making. Working with Valley Onward and Merced Lao Family, two trusted community-based organizations, the City will conduct “reach-in” engagement that meets residents where they are, use that input to prioritize corridors (building on the City’s adopted Local Roadway Safety Plan High Injury Network while letting residents validate and refine priorities), and host community workshops and design charrettes where residents review, create, and refine conceptual safety and active transportation improvements. CARB funding supports this community-driven planning and partnership-building, allowing the City to test new engagement approaches in a disengaged area and build readiness for future multimodal safety investments. Final deliverables include a written CGS governance framework, community engagement summaries, conceptual planning materials for two to three priority corridors, and a roadmap of next steps and potential funding opportunities.
Project Descriptions and Transportation Equity
South Merced’s transportation inequities are rooted in a specific history: the 1960s realignment of State Route 99 redlined the 7.39-square-mile community, concentrated environmental burdens, limited access to safe transportation, and drove generations of disinvestment. Today, with low rates of personal vehicle ownership, many residents rely on walking, biking, or transit, yet the area has seen limited investment in active transportation and safety. The City’s Local Roadway Safety Plan identifies five South Merced corridors in its High Injury Network, where gaps in sidewalk and bicycle infrastructure, unsafe or missing crossings, high vehicle speeds, and poor lighting create daily risks, especially for children, seniors, and people with disabilities. These burdens are compounded by heavy pollution exposure from proximity to SR 99: EPA EJScreen data places South Merced in the 92nd percentile statewide for PM2.5 and the 75th percentile for diesel particulate matter, with traffic exceeding 1.8 million vehicle-miles traveled per day, contributing to asthma, heart disease, higher disability rates, and lower life expectancy.
The project advances equity by putting residents at the center of how these conditions get addressed. Critical routes like 16th Street, Childs Avenue, and R, G, and V Streets, which connect residents to schools, parks, food distribution sites, transit, and services, are all part of the High Injury Network, and community input gathered through reach-in engagement will validate and refine which corridors are prioritized. Reach-in strategies include pop-up events at parks, food banks, and apartment complexes, plus canvassing and tabling at trusted locations, deliberately reducing barriers for residents typically excluded from planning. To support equitable participation, the project provides Spanish interpretation and translated materials and holds meetings at accessible times and locations that accommodate work schedules, caregiving, and transit access, with Valley Onward and Merced Lao Family facilitating these supports for non-English speakers, renters, youth, elders, and low-income households.
Community Benefit
The primary beneficiaries are low-income South Merced residents, including Spanish-speaking households, renters, families with children, youth, and seniors, who face unsafe walking and biking conditions, limited transit access, and long-standing exclusion from transportation decisions. The community is among the most disadvantaged in the state: all five of its census tracts qualify as disadvantaged under CalEnviroScreen, roughly 60% of residents live in poverty with a per capita income of $16,004, 74% are non-English-speaking (primarily Spanish-speaking), and 23% of households are limited-English-speaking. The project will produce community-informed safety and active transportation concepts for the priority corridors residents use daily to reach schools, parks, food sites, transit, and essential services, with engagement intentionally designed to include those most often left out through reach-in outreach, language access, and accessible meeting times.
Capacity-building is itself a core benefit. Residents who participate through outreach and the Collaborative Governance Structure will increase their planning literacy and confidence to share lived experience, help set corridor priorities, and review and refine concepts. The resulting concepts and engagement documentation strengthen the community’s readiness to pursue future implementation funding, improving the likelihood that subsequent investments genuinely reflect South Merced’s priorities rather than being decided elsewhere.
Partnerships and Structure
The partnership is intentionally designed to address historical power imbalances by embedding community partners directly in planning and decision-making, with a transparent governance framework that clarifies roles, responsibilities, decision-making processes, and communication protocols. The roles are organized as follows:
City of Merced (Lead Applicant): Responsible for fiscal management, coordination among partners, and technical planning support, ensuring project completion and alignment with adopted plans while supporting a community-led approach to decision-making.
Valley Onward (Co-Applicant): Leads culturally responsive outreach using its established promotoras model, drawing on deep trust and long-standing relationships with low-income, Spanish-speaking South Merced households around health, safety, and active living, building on prior planning collaborations with the City.
Merced Lao Family (Co-Applicant): Supports outreach and engagement tailored to the city’s large Hmong population, ensuring language access, cultural relevance, and trust-building, drawing on its integral role in community engagement for the design of General Vang Pao Park.
Decision-making is anchored in the Collaborative Governance Structure, the central forum for shared leadership and accountability. The CGS consists of a Coordination Council, a Community Steering Committee, and a Community Outreach Working Group, supported by City staff and working groups as needed. Membership will reflect the cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic characteristics of South Merced, with emphasis on engaging low-income households, non-English speakers, renters, youth, and seniors, and clear feedback loops will demonstrate how community input directly informs planning concepts and decisions. Crucially, the CGS is designed to persist beyond the grant term as a standing forum for community-City collaboration, making it both a governance mechanism and a long-term sustainability outcome.