Norwalk sidewalks continue to confound Council members

NORWALK, Conn. — You might think that with a $1 million expected to be spent on Norwalk sidewalks in the next capital budget and a new sidewalk ordinance just passed by the Common Council that progress was being made.

At least two Common Council members think otherwise.

“I am scratching my head. We are not done,” Councilman Bruce Kimmel (D-At Large) said last week after pressing Department of Public Works Director Hal Alvord on how the money will be spent.

Planning Committee Chairman Doug Hempstead (R-At Large) also expressed frustration after Alvord told Planning Committee members that the $1 million will be spent in conjunction with road paving. The sidewalks are “abysmal” on Garner Street, Golden Hill Street and Couch Street, Alvord said, and those will be replaced this summer, as those roads are slated for repaving.

Although the new ordinance enhances Alvord’s power to demand that property owners repair the sidewalks in front of their homes by giving the property owners the option to finance the work by paying off a city lien on their property over a maximum of 10 years, Alvord said he is short on manpower and showed no inclination to do that.

“If the mayor tells me to go out and order people to repair sidewalks or bill them for repairing sidewalks, I will do it,” Alvord said.

“The ordinance is passed but this gets to be ‘how do we view public sidewalks?’” Hempstead said. “…Now we have three full streets that are going to get free sidewalks, and somebody else can get cited and not get free sidewalks.”

The conversation started with Kimmel asking Alvord, assuming the $1 million is approved, how the money would be spent in the context of the new ordinance.

None would go to sidewalks that aren’t on roads that are slated for imminent paving, Alvord said.

“Our intent, with the funds the way they have progressed to this point, is a fair chunk of that, let’s say half, would be done as part of paving because we are looking at 54 streets this year. A lot of those have sidewalks and we know we’re going to have to redo the curbing to get the drainage to work right on the street. The other half, we’re looking at doing a separate contract to address for example, Garner Street, Couch, Golden Hill, where the sidewalks are abysmal,” Alvord said.

Garner, Couch and Golden Hill will get sidewalk work this year and paving next year, he said. “You always put the sidewalk in first. It makes no sense to pave the street and then cut it all up,” he said.

The conversation about sidewalks began two years ago with concerns about potential city liability due to poor sidewalks, Kimmel said. Although state law says that the city is not responsible for fixing sidewalks, the city can be liable if it knows a sidewalk is bad and does nothing to force its repair, he said.

Kimmel asked hypothetically about sidewalks, maybe a block away from those streets, that might be bad but are not on a road that needs repaving.

“You know there’s a half a dozen places where the sidewalks are so bad they’re just coming up. You have to walk in the street. Those streets aren’t going to be done for the next 10 years. For whatever reason, the sidewalks are in bad shape and the streets are OK,” Kimmel said. “… What will happen to protect the city in case some tragedy would occur because of the sidewalk?”

“What we have done to analyze, what I’ll call the sidewalk analysis, is not what we would anticipate we would be doing in ordering property owners to repair sections of sidewalks,” Alvord said. “I don’t see us going out ordering a property owners to replace sidewalks on 150 to 200 feet of their property frontage. What I do see is we see a couple of panels that are so busted up that they are a tripping hazard, a safety hazard to the public, then I would go order that property owner to go replace those panels. I have done that probably two dozen times and they always comply. So I don’t see ordering property owners to go out and replace long lengths of sidewalks, it’s just those things that are real hazards that should be addressed in short order.”

“The way I understood this, Couch Street and all of that should be handled by the property owners who need to fix their sidewalks,” Hempstead said. “If you’re telling me they’re in disrepair, then they should be cited today and that’s what that whole ordinance was about because they didn’t want liability on the city. Now what you’re saying is well, that’s not necessarily true.”

“I tried to make that point but you voted for it,” Councilman Rich Bonenfant (R-At Large) said.

“It’s not us,” Kimmel said, referring to state law.

“You needed upfront money to repair sidewalks,” Hempstead said to Alvord. “Now what we’re saying is the only reason the additional sidewalk money is there is to fund sidewalks with road paving.”

This in spite of doubling the capital budget allocation for sidewalks, Hempstead said.

Alvord said the concept has always been that the city replaces sidewalks that it damages in the course of road repaving, as part of making sure water drains properly from the streets. Hempstead said Couch Street is a hill, and asked how it could have a drainage problem.

“It may not go into catch basins properly. It may all go down to Fairfield Avenue and create flooding down there,” Alvord said.

The new ordinance says that if 51 percent of the sidewalks are being replaced as part of the paving program, then they all must be replaced.

“I put that in because I thought it was unfair,” Hempstead said.

That would be done “unless it breaks the budget,” Alvord said.

“The problem is you’re applying a common sense approach,” Kimmel said. “We are stuck with state law that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So now we have an ordinance that complies to state law and we are basically asking what is going to happen. Let’s go back to Couch Street. I was under the impression that if paving creates the sidewalk problem then the city is responsible for the repair of it. You seem to be saying the pavement always creates a sidewalk problem and that’s why you’re doing the sidewalks first.”

“In many cases that’s true, not necessarily on the whole street,” Alvord said, going on to explain that all of the sidewalks were replaced on Taylor Avenue because of drainage issues.

Public Works Committee Chairman David McCarthy (R-District E) said Alvord’s responses made sense.

“I don’t see it as being widely inconsistent, it’s not like he’s going down and replacing some arbitrary street,” McCarthy said. “We do need to go through the inventory.”

By that he meant the recent $20,000 analysis of Norwalk urban zone sidewalks, which Alvord is refusing to share with the public or committee members. McCarthy has a copy of the analysis, Alvord said during the meeting.

The analysis rated sidewalks on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst. Alvord said that the preliminary interpretation of the analysis showed that if all of the sidewalks that were rated 7 or worse were replaced with the materials they currently consist of it would cost $7 million. If they were brought up to the city standard of concrete the cost would be almost $12 million, he said.

“I am assuming worst ones first,” Hempstead said.

“Uh?” Alvord said.

“Everybody’s touting that we are putting $1 million into sidewalks,” Hempstead said. “What I am trying to get at, that you are taking that report, you’re taking the worst ones first, like you would a road. Is that correct?”

“No, because I don’t have the resources to do that,” Alvord said. “What I am trying to do is I am trying to marry up sidewalks that we are doing with paving, and looking ahead to paving jobs that we have down the road because I don’t have the staff to go do yet another sidewalk contract for streets where we are not going to pave for 5 or 10 years. I am about to lose Dick Linnartz and Brian Sweeney.”

“What’s the sense to get a report to tell you what’s bad, what’s the sense to put $1 million in if you’re not going to fix what’s bad?” Hempstead said. “That’s what this was all about, I thought, started two years ago and it seems like we’re at a point where we’ve got money and we’re not fixing what is the problem.”

Alvord said a lot of bad sidewalks were being repaired; Hempstead said the city isn’t starting with the worst sidewalks.

“That might be the case,” McCarthy said. “Given Hal’s staff constraint, if you want to go after that then that becomes, as he said, a panel here, a panel there.”

“With the resources I have today I don’t see us getting to the point of being able to do that,” Alvord said. “In fact, with the resources I have today I can’t even go out and find those busted up panels to order the property owner to do one or two panels. I have a part time ordinance enforcement guy – he’s not an engineer, he’s a retired cop and he does a good job in the wintertime on snow from sidewalks. He’s buried in the winter. He’s still working off snow removal work order and city work, and in the summertime he’s buried in garbage complaints, and all of his time is on garbage. But he’s not an engineer anyway so he wouldn’t be the guy. If I had an engineer that I could spare to do that, that would be a way to go about that and work down the liability issue.”

Kimmel suggested that maybe the road paving program would have to be rescheduled to align with the need to repair sidewalks.

After the meeting, Hempstead talked about property rights.

“We try to compromise to get the best thing we can,” Hempstead said. “If it’s on city property then the city should own it. In other words, a sidewalk on city property is not the abutting homeowners responsibility. You can say go clearing for snow, I get it for that because the city doesn’t have the resources.”

Most sidewalks are in the city’s roadway, he said.

“I think sidewalks should be handled by the city because this is a perfect example tonight, we’re going to do three major roads and I bet you if we went down Woodward Avenue and look at the sidewalks on the corner down there, probably all falling apart, cars always going over them or parked on them and technically we should be going out and citing them,” Hempstead said.

“My goal was to set up a separate sidewalk account to deal with what the ordinance requires but they didn’t do that,” Kimmel said. “So this year we got the ordinance, next year we have to get the budgeting in place and make some decisions. (We’re) not in terrible, terrible, terrible shape, we haven’t been sued. We’ll see what happens now that we have the ordinance.”