Sidewalk inspections to start in preparation for repair policy proposal

An East Lawrence resident casts a shadow on a sidewalk along Rhode Island Street on Friday, Oct. 21, 2016.

The City of Lawrence is starting its first round of sidewalk inspections in preparation for what is likely to be a lively debate on how the repairs will be enforced.

As part of a push to enforce the city’s longstanding sidewalk repair policy, which puts the responsibility for repairing sidewalks on the adjacent property owner, city inspectors will begin marking deficient sidewalks and inputting their condition into a city database on Monday.

“They’ll just walk and when they find a defect they’ll document that defect and take a picture of it,” said Mark Thiel, assistant public works director. “And it all gets done through our Geographical Information System, so it’s in real time.”

Any further action, such as sending notices to property owners, is contingent upon the City Commission’s pending decision on exactly how it would like the policy to be enforced. Several ideas have been proposed, including a loan and/or grant program to cover repairs for low-income residents. Some commissioners have also said they are interested in discussing the city using tax dollars to help fund repairs.

The city has operated on a complaint-based system for years, and didn’t enforce the standing policy with more than warning letters. It is estimated that more than one-third of the approximately 40,000 lots in the city have adjacent sidewalks that are out of compliance. The cost of those repairs is estimated to be about $6.1 million.

As part of the work to address the repair needs, city staff have broken the city into eight geographic regions, which they indicate would be a manageable amount of sidewalk to inspect and repair in a single year. Thiel said the first year of inspections will be on the northwestern region, a more recently developed section of the city that he said contains all the components the city will have to oversee: schools, retail, residential, as well as arterial and collector streets.

“It included many of the attributes that we wanted to make sure we had in all of our geographic regions,” Thiel said.

The standing policy, though, isn’t without its detractors. The Lawrence Association of Neighborhoods recently released a statement of opposition to enforcement of the policy in its current form. LAN, which includes representatives from about a dozen Lawrence neighborhoods, decided on its stance following a vote, said LAN co-chair Candice Davis.

LAN wants the city to look into options beyond having residents foot the bill directly. The statement reads, in part:

“LAN wishes to explore the possibility of the city combining sidewalks into infrastructure policies, including cost and maintenance. LAN is of the opinion that there has not been enough research into an equitable solution for sidewalk maintenance that is financed by taxpayers citywide.”

The statement was sent to city commissioners and city staff. Davis said the idea is that they want the commission to focus on an equitable way to pay for repairs, noting that sidewalks are used by everybody.

“There are a lot of variables,” Davis said. “I would say ideally yes, we would really like the city to pay for it. How do you do that so that it’s equally shared among everyone who lives here? I don’t know, and that’s something we want to look into more.”

Davis also noted that the issue of sidewalk repair is not a new one.

“I would say about 20 years is fair,” Davis said. “This has been going on a long time, and then it disappears. It becomes low on the priorities again.”

The topic got renewed attention under the direction of City Manager Tom Markus, who was hired last year.

Thiel said he expects the inspections of the northwestern region of the city to take two to three weeks, and data collected about the sidewalks will to help develop a draft of the sidewalk repair program policy that will be presented to the City Commission.

“This may be for naught; if the commission decides to go in a different direction, we may have to redo some of it,” Thiel said. “But at least they’ll have a good idea of what we’re looking at in terms of one-eighth of the city for sidewalk defects and handicap ramp issues.”

The draft sidewalk repair policy is scheduled to go before the City Commission in March.