(Don't) walk this way

Jean Stotts is so annoyed about the sidewalks in her Yakima neighborhood that she recently attended a City Council meeting to complain about it.

Stotts lives in the 1000 block of South Sixth Street, one of the city's older neighborhoods, but by no means the oldest. Yet the sidewalks there, like many places in the city, are often in poor condition.

"I do a lot of walking," says Stotts, a retired housekeeper who grew up in Yakima, "and there's some sidewalks near my home that are so bad I'm really afraid of tripping and falling. Sometimes you even have to walk in the street, the sidewalks are so bad."

The irony of walking around something meant to walk on is not lost on city officials, who say they get a steady stream of complaints about crumbling sidewalks every year.

That's not counting the three or four threatened lawsuits the city gets every year from people claiming sidewalk-related injuries.

But it might come as a surprise that state law dating to the 1920s places the responsibility for maintaining and repairing sidewalks squarely on the shoulders of property owners.

If you call the city to complain, an employee of the Public Works department will investigate, city officials say. But identifying sidewalks in need of repair and actually getting them repaired, they said, are two different things.

The main problem is that fixing cracked or crumbling sidewalks can cost thousands of dollars, especially when the underlying cause is tree roots, which can lift entire panels of concrete.

And even though the law allows the city to place liens on property to pay for repairs, the legal process is so laborious that collecting is never a sure thing.

"It's an old story," says Joan Davenport, a spokeswoman for the Public Works department. "Often the sidewalks that are in worst repair are in neighborhoods where residents just don't have the resources" to fix them.

The extent of the problem is unknown -- the city does not keep track of problem spots. It doesn't even have an exact accounting of sidewalks in general, although a 2006 inventory performed by a college intern estimated the city has roughly 198 linear miles of sidewalk compared with 500 miles of streets.

That means that fewer than half of Yakima's streets have a sidewalk on one side of the street. In reality, some streets have sidewalks on both sides. Some have none at all.

Yakima is not the only city struggling with sidewalk infrastructure. A story last month in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted that Seattle's sidewalks are also in bad shape, undercutting Mayor Greg Nickels' recent "drive less, walk more" directive to residents of the Emerald City.

The same story said that 30 percent of Seattle streets have no sidewalks at all and that fixing or building sidewalks there would cost anywhere from $270 million to upwards of $4.5 billion.

That kind of money is a far cry from the $50,000 the City Council here in Yakima budgets every year for sidewalk repair. The money is doled out as part of a 50-50 program, meaning the city will split the cost of repairs with a property owner.

Davenport says there is no shortage of candidates for the 50-50 money. But with the average home-front sidewalk repair estimated at $7,000, the money doesn't go far. That figure includes cutting back tree roots, a common cause of sidewalk cracking.

In recent years, the city has been able to repair or build sidewalks near two schools, Robertson Elementary on Lincoln Avenue and Summitview Elementary at Chestnut and 66th avenues, using state pedestrian safety grants.

In addition, Davenport says the City Council this year budgeted $25,000 for unspecified repairs to "public areas" that will pay to fix sidewalks along Chestnut Avenue above Franklin Park.

That money, however, is a one-time set-aside. In the meantime, the city is building four new push-button crosswalks at busy intersections, including two on 16th Avenue.

Of course, there is nothing stopping homeowners from fixing sidewalks themselves, without bird-dogging by the city.

Davenport says all that's needed is a permit. She also notes another little known fact about sidewalks -- property owners, by law, are required to keep them clear of snow and ice.

"All we ask is that you don't use rock salt" to melt snow and ice, she says, "otherwise it can ruin the concrete. And we've got enough problems with that as it is."

* Chris Bristol can be reached at 577-7748 or cbristol@yakimaherald.com.

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