By Michael Donoghue

Veteran Vermont police officer Allan A. Fortin, who became the leading voice and face for highway traffic safety in the state, died at his Hinesburg home Sunday. He was 61.

Fortin, a lieutenant with the Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department, won numerous awards for his highway traffic safety work about drunken driving, proper use of seatbelts, speeding, child safety seat protections, passing stopped school buses, aggressive driving and more. The awards included being honored at a Vermont Statehouse ceremony in 2017.

He served as the fulltime Traffic Safety Coordinator for Chittenden, Franklin, Grand Isle, Lamoille and Orleans counties.

Fortin hosted numerous press conferences and public events throughout Vermont for two decades on every kind of safety issue and was the go-to-guy for media members looking for comments and statistics for any news story. He helped coordinate a news conference last month at Jay Peak Resort concerning winter driving and sharing the roads with slow moving vulnerable road users.

“It is hard to guess how many lives Al Fortin saved through his safety messages and enforcement work,” Chittenden County Sheriff Dan Gamelin said Sunday.

He collapsed at his home Sunday morning and first responders were unable to revive him.

Gamelin said survivors include Fortin’s wife, Anne, and their three adult sons.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

Fortin began his extra focus on traffic safety work initially part-time when he was not serving as the No. 2 person at Shelburne Police. It was a passion he held for two dozen years.

Former Shelburne Police Chief James Warden hired Fortin as a patrol officer in 1989. Fortin worked his way up to be a sergeant and later as lieutenant at the police department. He eventually retired in August 2018.

Fortin jumped at the chance to become the first fulltime safety office in Chittenden County through the sheriff’s office in October 2018. It soon expanded to other nearby counties.

He also had served his hometown of Hinesburg as its first part-time police chief (1989-95) while still working for Shelburne. He stayed on in Hinesburg as a part-time lieutenant to help the town’s first fulltime chief, Chris Morrell, until 1999.

In 2019 Fortin was one of six leading candidates to become police chief again in Hinesburg, but the sleepy little town eventually picked what turned out to be the applicant with the least experience as a police officer and no administrative background.

During his career, Fortin also found time to serve the state of Vermont as a deputy game warden for 24 years.

Fortin, who was assigned at Shelburne Police to a 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift, laughed when he was told he would be working at the sheriff’s office a Monday through Friday day shift with no scheduled nights, weekends or holidays. He still managed to show up for safety roadblocks on some weekend nights to support area departments.

A Hinesburg native, Fortin moved to Monkton and graduated from Mount Abraham Union High School in 1982. He served in the U.S. Army for a couple of years before returning to Vermont, where his family opened a restaurant in Hinesburg in the mid-1980s. Fortin became the Hinesburg town constable in October 1987.

He was a master chef and known for his apple pies.