Columbia sidewalk maintenance: One proposal rejected, others sought | Columbia Daily Tribune

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The city has fallen behind on maintenance of its 557 miles of sidewalks. Sidewalks have a life of about 25 to 30 years, and the city repaired or replaced only about 1.5 miles of sidewalk between 2008 and 2013, according to a city report.

The point-of-sale policy was proposed to address the backlog because more than half of the real estate in the city is sold at least once a decade and the city has difficulty enforcing sidewalk maintenance requirements.

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Columbia sidewalk maintenance: One proposal rejected, others sought | Columbia Daily Tribune

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MoBikeFed comment: Funding for sidewalk maintenance is an ongoing problem for cities across Missouri. Typically, sidewalk construction, maintenance, and reconstruction is the responsibility of landowners. This is completely unlike the way we fund construction and maintenance for city streets and creates a large number of headaches for cities.

How do cities monitor the condition of sidewalks and work to keep sidewalk systems complete and maintained, when they have no funding and must depend on some way of enforcing landowner's responsibility to maintain the sidewalks to do so.

It is not an easy problem to solve--short of the adopting a completely different system, one more similar to the way city streets are maintained, where the city simply adopts responsibility for major construction and upkeep of the sidewalks once they initial developer and completed construction.