Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 5, 1994 TAG: 9404050058
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Medium
Now the city is developing a reputation for something else: lousy sidewalks.
Rip up all the damaged sidewalks in Charlottesville and line them end to end, and you get a 5-mile path of chips, cracks and crumbles - and one four-worker city crew to fix them.
"It's just like a pothole in the street," said Steve Lawson, who heads the public service group in the city Department of Public Works. "But instead of a damaged car, you could have a damaged person."
If workers continue to repair about 150 damaged sidewalks a year, and only about 100 new hazards appear annually, it will take 26 years for city employees to catch up with the damaged sidewalks.
Even if the city doesn't get any more hazards to add to the list, it would take nine years to repair all the sidewalks with the crew now assigned to the task.
The list of city sidewalk hazards is 26 pages long. It begins with the 125 areas that have drawn complaints to Lawson's office, and it ends with about 1,200 areas identified as hazards by city workers in a recent survey.
There also are two pages of areas where sidewalks need to be reconstructed. One location has about 1,200 feet of sidewalk that needs to be rebuilt.
Sidewalk repairs traditionally have been handled by city workers. Two years ago, the city reassigned one concrete crew in the Public Works Department, leaving four workers the daunting task of repairing all the sidewalk hazards in the city.
"We just did one last week . . . where we'd gotten the complaint four years ago and just got to it," Lawson said.
There's only enough money in this year's budget to repair about 27 of the 81 sites that need sidewalk and curb reconstruction, Lawson said.
by CNB