Denver voters are set to weigh in on the question in next week’s election, while also deciding on a tax that could help pay for sidewalk upgrades.
By Daniel C. Vock, Route Fifty
With all the talk about infrastructure in the country over the last few years, one of the most familiar transportation networks has often been overlooked and underfunded: city sidewalks. But voters in Denver this month will have a chance to change that.
They will get to decide whether to shift the responsibility of maintaining sidewalks from individual property owners to the city. The proposal on next week’s ballot would also impose a tax on property owners, to help maintain the city’s current sidewalks and add them in the many parts of town where they’re missing.
Advocates put the initiative on the ballot, after they grew frustrated with the city government’s efforts to improve sidewalks. Denver Deserves Sidewalks, the group pushing for the effort, said the proposal would lead to a full sidewalk network in every neighborhood in nine years instead of the 400 years it would take at the city’s current pace. (City officials say that, even if the ballot measure passes, it would take more than 27 years to build out the sidewalks and that the taxes won’t raise enough money.)
If the measure is approved, Denver would be one of a handful of cities that have tackled the thorny issue of building out sidewalk networks, experts say.
“Most cities put the onus of maintenance of sidewalks on the property owners,” said Wesley Marshall, a civil engineering professor at the University of Colorado Denver, who has studied sidewalk ownership in cities. But that varies significantly by region. City transportation departments in eastern cities like Boston and Washington, D.C., maintain sidewalks similar to how they keep up streets.
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