photo by: Richard Gwin

In response to a task force’s request that Lawrence sidewalks be better maintained, City Manager Tom Markus said Tuesday that city leaders should have more “courage” in imposing what has been called a “politically unenforceable” sidewalk maintenance policy: property owners paying for repairs.

The discussion came up as part of the final report from the Pedestrian-Bicycle Issues Task Force on challenges with Lawrence pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure and recommendations on how to deal with them. The task force didn’t propose a solution for ill-maintained sidewalks but said the issue needed to be discussed and a new maintenance program put in place by 2017.

The task force estimated it would cost $6.2 million to repair all existing sidewalks, some of which “present safety hazards” and “discourage walking,” the report states.

Markus, who recently moved to Lawrence after serving as city manager of Iowa City, said Lawrence had been “negligent” in handling sidewalk repair

“I’ve walked your neighborhoods and seen people struggle,” Markus said. “There’s liability with trip and fall hazards, and, quite frankly, it’s gone on too long.”

Markus said he didn’t think the city had the means to maintain all the sidewalks itself. Instead, he said, it should impose the current state and city law of having property owners do the repairs.

The City Commission voted 5-0 to send the final report to city staff, which will come back to the body with recommendations on how to accomplish some of the task force’s requests. That recommendation will include what the city should do about sidewalk maintenance, with the possibility of determining high-traffic sidewalks that should be dealt with first.

At a February study session on the task force’s report, City Engineer Dave Cronin explained that the city currently enforces the sidewalk repair policy only when it receives complaints about damage. Property owners are notified and given several opportunities to respond before the city has the authority to make the repairs and bill the property owners, which, Cronin said, the city has never done.

“The challenging thing is, when you send a letter and then they call and say, ‘I want to fix it, but I need to buy a prescription for my kids’ or ‘I need to put food on the table, how can you make me repair the sidewalk?'” Cronin said at the time.

“It’s tough to impose those types of requirements,” Markus said. “It’s going to take a lot of stamina and courage from the commission to stand up and move these things forward. From us as well.”

Commissioner Matthew Herbert agreed that the current policy needed enforcing, saying: “It’s not that we haven’t had a policy, it’s that we haven’t had a backbone with the policy we have.”

Other task force priorities — completing the Lawrence Loop, filling in sidewalk gaps on Safe Routes to School and making streets safer for bicyclists — will be considered during 2017 budget talks, Markus said.

At the kickoff of 2017 budget discussions earlier Tuesday, commissioners had heard from the city finance department that, if the city continues overspending like it did in 2015 — with no increase in revenues — the general fund would be completely depleted by 2020.

“I’m not sure how we’re going to go about this; at the same time, we’re dealing with affordable housing issues, which I think is a very high priority in this town,” Markus said. “We have deficit spending, a tax lid coming into play. There’s a lot of challenges here.”

More than a dozen people spoke Tuesday in favor of the task force’s requests, which, if implemented, would make Lawrence a safer, more welcoming place to be a pedestrian or bicyclist, said Marilyn Hull, who chaired the task force.

“We didn’t have outrageous hopes there would suddenly be millions and millions and millions of dollars available right away to transform the city,” Hull said. “We’d like to present to you some incremental steps… we really encourage you to not wait to make progress on this. You can make a statement by doing something in 2017 that’s really going to start to change the course of where we are as a community.”