San Diego begins its first-ever assessment of its 5,000 miles of public sidewalks

By Hutton Marshall | SDUN Editor

At the corner of Dale and Ash Streets in Golden Hill, city officials gathered on Friday, Jan. 10 alongside a small horde of city interns to begin the City’s first effort to evaluate the condition of its roughly estimated 5,000 miles of public sidewalks.

Expected to take a year to complete, the project will be carried out by engineering students from San Diego State and UC San Diego interning with the City of San Diego, who will use handheld GPS devices configured to enable rapid data entry. The assessment is estimated to cost $1 million, which is the same amount the city spends each year on new and missing sidewalks.

This undertaking signifies a new, proactive approach to the city’s sidewalks, said Councilmember and Infrastructure Committee chair Mark Kersey. City administration receives an average of 200 sidewalk complaints per month, according to a December report to the Infrastructure Committee. With each sidewalk repair costing approximately $2,500, the funding required to address these concerns is considerable.

“This is going to be an ongoing discussion we’ll have this year, which we kind of started at my committee in December,” Kersey said.

But the real problem is a liability issue. Current city laws put the burden of fixing a sidewalk on its adjacent property owner, but if someone trips on one of these neglected walkways, it’s the city that can be held liable. Because of this, most sidewalks have been left in disrepair, with both the City and the residents unsatisfied with the result.

$100,000 is budgeted each year through the Street Division’s operating budget for its “50/50 Sidewalk Cost Share Program,” which helps residents repair their deteriorated sidewalks by providing half the cost of doing so. However, participation in the program has been next to nonexistent. Only 13 property owners used it from its inception in 2011 until 2013. At the time of the report to the infrastructure committee last month, 14 people were currently participating in the program, and 87 others had submitted requests for participation.

While this serves as an incentive for residents to initiate the process of repairing sidewalks near their home, the City will look at new policies to address sidewalk maintenance itself. Currently, it will only repair a sidewalk that presents a clear safety liability.

“If there’s a truly egregious situation where it’s an obvious trip and fall hazard, the City will come out and patch it,” Kersey said.

The City Council recently voted to issue a $120 million infrastructure bond, but none of this money can be used for sidewalk maintenance, since it isn’t technically considered capital infrastructure said Kersey. Because of this, the city will need to create a clear financial pathway that allocates money toward sidewalk maintenance.

“It’s a quality of life issue is what it comes down to,” Kersey said. “If you’ve got a busted up sidewalk in front of your house, you want it fixed.”