To the editor:

For those of you who didn’t have to shovel the snow that fell during this Christmas/ New Year’s season but use the sidewalks we shoveled for you … you owe us big time!

That was heavy, wet snow that took forever to shovel. Some of us even put down sand. But blizzard conditions blew snow back over the sidewalks we’d already shoveled. And now it’s snowed repeatedly. So a bunch of us keep shoveling.

But what’s Thursday’s lead article? Ticketing for not shoveling — tickets based on people’s complaints. And the Sound Off question? “What number do I call to complain about my neighbor not shoveling his sidewalk?”

To all of you complainers: Have you ever shoveled your neighbor’s sidewalk while doing yours? If you live across the street and don’t have a sidewalk, have you walked across the street and shoveled your neighbor’s sidewalk? Or, if you saw your neighbor out there, grabbed a shovel and come over to help? Or, if you don’t have a shovel, offered to take over for a bit? Or even been a snow shoveling volunteer?

Yeah, sure you have.

We sidewalk “owners” get zero benefit from having a sidewalk — just time and hard work and expense and complaints. But we can’t remove the sidewalk and eliminate our city-mandated responsibilities because those sidewalks aren’t really ours. We have zero control over them. We’re just “maintenance men.”

EVERYONE should be responsible for sidewalks because they’re open to public traffic, just like streets. Until then, try being a good neighbor yourself.