The last years have seen many fights over the sidewalk section of the municipal code inside Atlanta City Hall. In 2014, a majority of the city council supported an ordinance that would have the city pay for sidewalk repairs, but Mayor Kasim Reed objected to the creation of an unfunded mandate.

He suggested a substitute ordinance, which was approved in August 2015. The municipal code now has the same language as before – with the addition of a clause that states “provided however that where funding is identified, applicable and available for implementation of repairs by the city, such repairs not required due to damage directly attributable to action(s) of the abutting property owner or agents, contractors, or employees of the abutting property owner, shall be undertaken by the city upon a prioritized basis until the funding is exhausted. The absence of city funding shall not excuse the abutting property owner from the requirements of this section.”

But Sally Flocks, founder of PEDS, an Atlanta-based pedestrian safety organization, says the amended ordinance is not a real fix – homeowners are still on the hook.

“I commented at a council meeting that we already had an unfunded mandate, the Americans with Disabilities Act,” she says. Beth Beckley and her attorney would agree.

Most crucially, the amended ordinance doesn’t require that any money has to be allocated at all. Some money from the city’s general fund has been directed towards infrastructure repair – increasing by 0.5 percent each year and set to cap out at 3.5 percent – but that fund is small. In 2011, the city council passed legislation to create a sidewalk trust fund, but in late 2012, the fund only had $1.5 million. In 2010, the city estimated the sidewalk repair backlog was about $152 million in damage. The cost of that damage increases exponentially when left to decay, says Guensler. In 2012, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech estimated that “if the City of Atlanta were to keep repairing the sidewalk in a piece-by-piece manner,” repair costs could reach almost $400 million.



As for the financial policy currently in place, “it’s an excuse to do nothing,” Flocks says. “They don’t want to enforce the law. They don’t want to pay for it.” And when they try to, like the city did in 2013, when it sent out about 90 notices to homeowners, it creates uproar.

“Somebody who’s in poverty is not going to be able to pay for sidewalk repairs,” Flocks says, especially considering that notified property owners only have 15 days to pay Public Works or hire their own contractor. Studies consistently show that over half of Americans don’t have even $500 in savings to cover unexpected expenses.



“If they’re not going to enforce that, they’re completely shirking their responsibilities to people with disabilities,” Flocks says. “Sidewalks are a program of government – that’s been determined by the courts – and if they’re not either fixing them themselves or following through and getting others to fix them, then it’s discriminating against all pedestrians, but especially people with disabilities who therefore cannot use the sidewalks.”



The U.S. Department of Justice agreed. In 2009, the department’s Disability Rights Section of its Civil Rights Division performed an ADA compliance audit of Atlanta’s public spaces and found numerous issues. In response, the DOJ and the city agreed to a settlement, which stipulated that over the next three years, the city would identify and fix all sidewalks resurfaced since 1992, when the ADA went into effect, that lacked ADA-compliant curb ramps.

The deadline came and went. By 2014, the city issued a policy statement and itemized list of public facilities that weren’t ADA-compliant, including sidewalks and curb ramps. Still, almost seven years after that initial agreement, Beth Beckley found herself stranded downtown, unable to get on or off of the sidewalk.

