City sidewalk repair policy gives citizens false sense of security

Too often I see evidence that the success of a democratic government depends on the stupidity of those being governed. In Kyle, however, it’s not so much stupidity as it is the laissez-faire attitude of the local populace. Look at the facts: Only 8.3 percent of Kyle’s registered voters bothered to cast a ballot in last year’s mayoral election. That means 91.7 percent simply don’t give a damn and when you have that many people who don’t give a damn you wind up with municipal policies that are stupid, illogical and potentially downright dangerous.

Take the city’s sidewalk policy, as an example. Because so many simply don’t give a damn, the minuscule minority that do has bludgeoned the city into adopting this masquerade, this Wizard-of-Oz form of tomfoolery that argues individual property owners shouldn’t have to foot the bill for sidewalk repairs; they should be paid for by the city, forgetting, for some reason, that the money the city has to spend on these repairs come from the taxes paid by those individual property owners. It’s worse than the oil filter commercial where the salesman says "You can pay me now or you can pay me later," this one is along the lines of "You can pay me now, next year, the year after that and on into forever and never get a thing in return." And because that 91.7 percent who don’t give a damn, that’s what happens around here.

How that manifests itself was made clear during last night’s City Council meeting when Public Works Director Harper Wilder outlined the results of the city’s sidewalk repair pilot program in which $20,000 of taxpayer funds was set aside in the budget to pay for the leveling of sidewalk sections. The current budget hikes that amount to $50,000. Harper told the council that because most of the city’s uneven sidewalks were located in Plum Creek, that’s where the $20,000 was spent. That’s right, all money put into this particular pot by all the property owners in all of Kyle was spent on repairing sidewalks in just one subdivision, which also happens to be the subdivision that sends the most voters to the polls each election cycle. Wilder said Plum Creek was chosen however, because "it’s the most condensed area" and then he added in typical municipal government double-talk Plum Creek was where "we had the largest number of sidewalks repairs in one place per volume."

Wilder did say that the city will be concentrating on subdivisions on the east side of I-35 during the next repair spree, although "spree" may not be the operative word here since the waiting list is long..

As Wilder described it, this sidewalk leveling process takes place when tree roots "next to the sidewalks are causing the sidewalks to heave at the joints and it raises the sidewalk joints causing a trip or fall hazard." I emphasized that last part of what Wilder said because it is really important. It illustrates the folly of this sidewalk program and the danger it poses to property owners. And don’t fret, I’ll eventually get around to explaining just how dangerous it is.

In addition to just picking out a politically strong problematic subdivision, the sidewalk repair folks, like disc jockeys of a by-gone era, take requests. "Typically we’ll get a call from a citizen that says we have a hazard there on the sidewalk," Wilder said in response to a question from Mayor Travis Mitchell, "Our staff will go and identify that and kind of give it a priority level and that depends on the elevation difference. We have a running list right now" of property owners requesting sidewalk repairs.

Here’s part of the problem with this. The contractor who actually performs the repair work told the council last night a typical repair takes "a day or two." So under the best of conditions, working every day, 365 days a year, that translates into about 240 repairs completed per year. But we also know these folks aren’t going to be working every day of the year. According to the Working Day Payroll Calendar as developed by University Human Resources at the University of Iowa, this calendar year contains 261 working days. So now we’re talking about 174 repairs made per annum. And, in a response to a question posed by council member Dex Ellison, the city’s staff said that "running list" Wilder refers to currently contains more than 400 requests from citizens for sidewalk repairs. That’s a backlog of two years and 3½ months.

This brings me right back to that dang "trip or fall hazard." If a person, let’s say for the sake of this argument, an elderly person is out for a walk during a nice spring-like afternoon and an uneven sidewalk causes that person to trip and fall, seriously injuring himself in the process, the property owner where that sidewalk is located can be held liable. In Kyle, the city cannot be held liable, only the property owner. Now, in order to collect damages, the person filing the lawsuit must prove negligence on the part of the property owner. The courts have held that any one of three factors can be considered by a jury when determining negligence and one of them is the property owner was "in a position where they reasonably should have known of the dangerous surface and failed to repair it." The operative word in that last sentence are "known" and "repair." Reporting it is simply not enough. And if you’re on a waiting list that takes more than two years for your number to be called, that tells a jury you knew for that long "of the dangerous surface and failed to repair it" all that time.

At one point during the meeting, Mitchell wanted to know "how difficult it might be to put some kind of time line (presumably on the city’s web page) for when polylevel (the sidewalk repair function) will be in a particular subdivision" so residents can see that they "are on the schedule for March, or on the schedule for the fall." Mitchell said he wanted to "be able to give residents an answer when they ask when is their sidewalk going to be repaired."

Council member Daphne Tenorio took Mitchell’s suggestion a step further. She wanted the city’s web page to (1) have a place where residents could apply for the sidewalk repair and (2) publish that so-called "running list" so they could see about where they stood in the pecking order, given the caveat they could at any time be bumped even lower down the list if the city received a request it deemed was of a higher priority. Which is all well and good but it’s like a doctor giving a cancer patient a slice of apple pie. True, the pie, especially if it came from our own hometown pie company, could make the patient feel better but it’s not going to do anything to treat the cancer.

The simple fact is the city should not be in the sidewalk business in the first place. It’s simply not fair, it defies logic, for someone on a rural piece of property with no sidewalks at all to be forced to pay for the repair of Plum Creek’s sidewalks. And what good is it to know where you stand on a two-year waiting list when that gives you no liability protection against someone who gets injured by sidewalks on your property?

But, then, since I’ve already established that most people in Kyle simply don’t give a damn, it only illustrates once again that the government functions essentially on the stupidity of those being governed.

All the voting items on last night’s agenda were approved 6-0 (council member Alex Villalobos did not attend) except for one — the minutes of the last meeting. And the lone person voting against those minutes was the only council member who did not attend that meeting. Go figure.