The board of central Arkansas’ regional planning agency has named a new executive director.
Casey Covington, who’s served as interim executive director of Metroplan since January, was appointed to the job on a permanent basis in a board meeting Wednesday.
Speaking with KUAR News, Covington said he’ll continue the agency’s legacy of promoting cooperation and planning across municipalities in the region.
“We have a long history, we started in 1955 and our job through that history has been to plan for central Arkansas,” he said. “It’s a very complex economy, it’s a very complex transportation system. And so when you look at different facilities, some are state-owned, some are city-owned… it’s our job to make sure that that occurs seamlessly.”
Covington has worked for the agency for nearly two decades, beginning as an engineer and ultimately serving as deputy director. He says he hopes to look at new ways to help fund improvements to transportation infrastructure.
“Public-private partnerships, it’s not been something that we have explored extensively in central Arkansas. But when we make a transportation investment, it helps private property owners. And when we can work together to make sure that we’re benefitting the transportation of central Arkansas, that benefits all of us.”
Covington says his first priority is to oversee the finalization of the Metropolitan Transportation Plan, which serves as a guide for transportation development for the next two decades. Aside from that, he says he’d also like the agency to focus more on improving traffic safety.
“It’s critical. We have over 100 central Arkansans that die each year in vehicle crashes. That’s too many,” he said. “This plan is going to allow us to identify those causes, those locations, and then develop projects that can specifically target areas where our serious injuries and our fatalities are occurring.”
He says a $700,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation will help to achieve that goal, through a federal program called Safe Streets and Roads for All.
