GHSA Honors Traffic Safety Leaders at Annual Meeting
The Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility was pleased to join with Allstate to sponsor a lunch in honor of the work of several leading traffic safety experts and programs as part of the Governors’ Highway Safety Association’s (GHSA) Annual Meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
GHSA presented its most prestigious honor, the James J. Howard Highway Safety Trailblazer Award, to the Honorable Kathleen Rice, District Attorney for Nassau County, New York. D.A. Rice has worked tirelessly to advance traffic safety initiatives in her county, paying special attention to teenagers, the nation’s most vulnerable drivers. She recognizes that early intervention and intensive supervision for DUI offenders reduce recidivism and makes the roads in her county safer every day.
GHSA presented the Kathryn J.R. Swanson Public Service Award to Joseph Farrow, Commissioner of the California Highway Patrol. During his 35 year career with the California Highway Patrol, the state has seen its lowest level of traffic-related fatalities ever recorded. He has also worked with the International Association of Chiefs of Police and other organizations to advance highway safety nationwide.
GHSA also presented four Peter K. O’Rourke Special Achievement Awards for outstanding highway safety accomplishments during the previous calendar year. One award recipient was www.responsibility.org partner Tim Hollister. Mr. Hollister is the author of Not So Fast: Parenting Your Teen Through the Dangers of Driving, which he wrote after he lost his 17 year-old son, Reid, in a car crash in 2006. A frequent speaker at conferences and in school, Mr. Hollister shares advice for parents of teen drivers and teens themselves on his website, FromReidsDad.com. He has also worked in his home state of Connecticut to overhaul the state’s graduated driver licensing (GDL) laws.
Judge John S. Kennedy and the Target 25 Program also received a Peter K. O’Rourke Special Achievement Award. The Target 25 Program is an anti-DUI recidivism campaign in York County, Pennsylvania, that targets the 25 percent of DUI offenders who are repeat or multiple offenders. Judge Kennedy has been at the helm of this effort. It is because of his work and the Target 25 program that, since its inception, York County has seen a 90 percent reduction in the number of DUI offenders who are arrested for a subsequent DUI in the same year, as well as a significant decrease in alcohol-involved crashes resulting in injury or fatality.
Peter K. O’Rourke Special Achievement Awards were also presented to AT&T’s It Can Wait Campaign and The Parent’s Supervised Driving Program.
Responsibility.org would like to congratulate all of the award recipients and thank them for their dedication and years of service to traffic safety as well as their communities.