Several Langley residents are raising the alarm about speeding on the outskirts of the city.

At a city council meeting Jan. 10, six citizens voiced their concerns about vehicles traveling too fast down Sandy Point Road, the majority of which is located within city limits.

Therese Magner said she has seen people traveling as fast as 65 mph on the road, which has a speed limit that fluctuates from 25 to 35 mph. She urged both the city and the county to take a closer look at the issue.

“It is unsafe,” she said. “It is all about enforcement. We need to come up, as a community, with a plan.”

Others speaking during the meeting said they felt unsafe walking their dogs or pushing a stroller along the road’s narrow shoulder.

“We’ve unfortunately had multiple deer carcasses in our front yard since moving here, and we’ve only been here since August 2020,” Julia Jenkins said. “I would hate for that to be any worse than a deer. That would be pretty terrible.”

Many speakers offered solutions, such as speed radar signs, speed bumps, fake cameras and a higher presence of law enforcement in the area.

Terry Rich suggested hitting speeders in the pocketbooks.

“These are very selfish people, the ones that are speeding,” he said. “Some of them are just going so fast. I don’t even know what the hurry is. Everyone says this is ‘island time’ until you get on a road around here.”

Council members were largely sympathetic to the issue, noting that they had also observed speeding on the road themselves.

“I live just around the corner from there and I avoid, as much as I can, walking along there,” Councilmember Gail Fleming said.

Councilmember Craig Cyr said he considered speeding to be the biggest public safety issue in Langley.

At the most recent city council meeting Tuesday night, Public Works Director Randi Perry presented speeding data that was collected by her department and Don Lauer, the city’s former police chief.

Traffic data was gathered from Aug. 5, 2021 to Nov. 8, 2021 and measured approximate speeds on Sixth Street and Sandy Point Road.

The results showed that vehicles are traveling at higher rates of speed on Sandy Point Road.

Since the completion of the study, Perry said she reached out to Island County and learned that an engineering team is working on an upcoming speed limit evaluation, with Sandy Point Road on its list of locations.

Council members asked Perry about purchasing a speed radar sign. She estimated the cost of a sign to be around $10,000.

“As you know, our streets budget took a pretty hard hit this year,” she said.

She added that the sheriff’s office has some mobile ones that the city may be able to use in the meantime.