After deciding that a public discussion about plans for a recreation center were better postponed until after the holidays, in Thursday’s meeting, the Cleveland City Council turned to a discussion of sidewalk projects they would like to complete in 2012.
The Council had originally set a public hearing on the recreation center for earlier in the evening, but cancelled the meeting, and postponed discussions until further notice.
“We’ve decided it would be best that we postpone the decision in light of Christmas and since everyone is in a crunch trying to ready for Christmas,” said Mayor Verla Jensen. “We felt it would be better if we brought it back up in either January or February.”
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According to certain members of the council, though, they may throw the idea out entirely because of a lack of funding.
Instead, the conversation turned to fixing “problem areas” in the city’s sidewalks. “We have whole Subdivisions with no sidewalks on either side of the blocks,” said Councilman Beth Mecham.
The Council decided there are approximately nine problem areas pertaining to the sidewalks in Cleveland, and that they would try to fix as many of the problems as possible.
Some of the problems include there being no sidewalk, no curb and gutter, or both. Also, there are a few intersections which are improperly signed/posted, and in order to make those intersections legal, they have to replace the yield signs and put in stop signs, or even just post signs in general.
In their discussions, one snag the Council reported they had run into with previous fixes was that of narrow roads which were too small to fit two cars in at once. The “fix” for that situation entailed curving the curbs so the cars could squeeze through. However, the snow plow could still barely fit down the roads.
The Council discussed one possibility to get around this is to look at the property line on each side of the road and get permission to use an exact amount of property from both sides to make the streets wide enough.
They assured that the amount taken from one person’s front yard would be the exact amount taken from everyone’s in order to not discriminate.
During their discussion, the council realized that the Special Service District is supposed to put in the curb and gutter for each area. Without curb and gutter being completed, the sidewalks cannot be put in; therefore, Cleveland City officials will be working with the service district to get the problem areas fixed by the end of the year.