City council focused on sidewalks during their recent 2023 budget meeting, including the criteria to replace such infrastructure when it’s deficient and whether rebar should be installed in high-traffic areas.
Next year, the public works department plans to spend $10,000 to rehabilitate sidewalks, while the engineering department expects to spend $578,500 to install new sidewalks, curbs and gutters.
Trip hazards
The small amount of money that public works intends to spend caught Mayor Clive Tolley’s eye, who wondered what work fell under the department’s umbrella and where other major work occurred.
“The operational program is a small one,” admitted director Darrin Stephanson during the Nov. 30 meeting. “There’s not a lot we can do with failed concrete infrastructure, so the capital program is what exists and where most dollars are directed for replacement on an annual basis. Engineering controls that program and selects the sites.”
Public works focuses on temporarily addressing sidewalk safety until a permanent solution is found, he added. It does that by grinding down sidewalk edges that are trip hazards or removing slabs that have sunk.
Complete replacement
Coun. Jamey Logan wondered how city hall decided when to replace sidewalks. He thought cracked pathways were obvious but wondered what criteria the municipality used when determining which sidewalks to replace first.
He also wondered if city hall was considering installing rebar in high-clay areas where the soil regularly pressures sidewalks.
Engineering completed a sidewalk condition assessment in 2020, recorded the 28,000 deficiencies it found, and entered that data into a computer program to track them, explained director Bevan Harlton. It gave every defect a value according to had bad it was; the worst value is 15, which is a trip hazard over 40 millimetres (four centimetres, 1.5 inches).
Therefore, sidewalks are replaced when roads are dug up for cast iron replacement or when a defect is rated 15 and staff see it needs fixing.
Complaints are another source used to address sidewalks, Harlton continued. Staff assess complaint-driven defects and work with public works to grind down the edges if necessary. However, complaints alone don’t lead to automatic replacement.
“If there are 10 complaints about a specific spot, there might be something else going on there. It might be higher activity (or) maybe the deficiency is worse than I think,” he added. “So we’ll maybe circle back to that.”
City administration changed its processes years ago so that, when they were replacing cast iron, they would also replace sidewalks even if one panel was bad and the rest were good, said city manager Jim Puffalt.
Installing rebar
As for rebar, city hall is working to introduce a new bylaw to enforce rebar on all private crossings, said Harlton. The municipality updated its detailed sidewalk drawings program in 2021 and wants rebar in all new sidewalks.
From a field standpoint, the information that engineering has received from contractors is that small sidewalk replacements are better, which is usually what the city is doing, he continued.
“Rebar is a good thing to have here. Our contractors are specialists and we listen to them,” Harlton added.
Picking and choosing
Residents often ask Tolley why the city chooses certain sidewalks to replace and leaves the rest. He hoped that city hall adopted an operating method that replaced an entire block instead of just a few sections.
“It seems citizens are really irritated by this … ,” he said.
Taking the least expensive approach is not always the best option, while there’s no sense trying to match up an old piece of concrete with new and then returning there in five years, said Puffalt. City hall wants to complete a project once and not return for another 20 years.
The municipality is facing a complete sidewalk replacement cycle of 125 to 150 years, while replacing one metre of sidewalk costs $500, said Harlton. To completely replace a full block costs $75,000 to $100,000, which is tough when the budget is $500,000 since there would be 20-per-cent less for other places.
“It doesn’t mean that it’s a bad option; it just means it will come at a cost for the other deficiencies throughout the city,” he said.
Tolley also wondered if the city could approach homeowners about replacing entire blocks of sidewalks through local improvement program (LIP) initiatives when crews are simultaneously replacing cast iron and the roads.
It’s possible, but whenever city hall sent out LIP letters to people, there was very little uptake, said Puffalt. Homeowners might change their minds if the city paid one-quarter of the costs. However, a uniform rates bylaw would help since homeowners would know the full cost.
The next budget meeting is Monday, Dec. 5.
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