At LAT, Steve Lopez on the failure of Los Angeles to fix its dilapidated sidewalks:
The city still does handle sidewalk repairs if the service request is by or for someone who is disabled, but that program is nothing to cheer about. In 2016, under terms of a federal disabled rights lawsuit known as the Willits case, the city agreed to spend nearly $1.4 billion on repairs over 30 years. Unfortunately, the city’s annual commitment of $30 million or more hasn’t been enough to make much of a dent in a backlog that’s in the thousands.
Venice resident Thahn Tran discovered this in June. She has a disabled tenant and was able to get into the queue for repairs of her cracked sidewalk. But her request was not deemed as a top-priority job, which she learned about in an email from the city’s Safe Sidewalks L.A. program And I quote: “The Council adopted Sidewalk Repair Program Prioritization and Scoring System assists the Program with prioritizing the overwhelming number of Access Requests. We currently have over 3,500 pending Access Requests.” For clarification, that backlog is separate from the 50,000 service requests that do not have disabled access prioritization, as noted in a 2021 audit.
But wait. I haven’t gotten to the best part of the email. “Your Access Request has a priority score of 30, out of a maximum score of 45. It is in a residential zone (15 points), and it is within 500 ft radius of a bus or transit stop (15 points). However, it has not been in the queue for over 120 days.” Here, now, is the soul crusher: “Currently, the estimated wait time for completion of an Access Request with a score of 30 is in excess of 10 years.”
In excess of. So they’re not even guaranteeing that a repair crew will arrive by 2034.