by kathye in Government Reform, Public Health & Safety
Posted on January 1, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Last Modified on January 4, 2010 at 10:58 pm
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We all know that the city has enacted onerous and unpopular parking regulations because it’s desperate for funds.
What if the city were as aggressive about clean, i.e. non-icy, sidewalks as it is about parking? I walked from Davis Square to Ball Square today, often in the road to avoid icy sidewalks. At one point I passed a police car, there because a car was blocking a driveway; but no one was issuing tickets for the many icy sidewalks on that block.
I’m getting old and have back problems. Sometimes it’s hard to find someone to help with shoveling, so here’s a possible solution: The city could hire young people to clear the sidewalks. They could patrol the sidewalks as they do parking, and set these young folks to work clearing icy walks. People whose sidewalks need clearing 6 hours — or whatever — after a storm would get a ticket, like a parking ticket. This ticket would cover the cost of clearing their sidewalk and some significant overhead for the city. Don’t like the price? Clear your g*&%^ walk or find someone who will!
And by the way, absentee landlords whose properties are a constant menace should pay enough to subsidize residents who barely make ends meet and have health problems that make it hard for them to shovel. No, I don’t really think it’s mostly frail old folks who fail to clear their walks, but they, or we, deserve some consideration.
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Hi Kathye,
I definitely sympathize with your desire for cleaner and safer sidewalks. Last Winter, I posted my own complaints about the issue on this blog.
Here are some relevant items from the BOA that I just found by searching on the City website:
Jan 24, 2008 BOA Mtg
Link to PDF
Order 22, by Ald. Gewirtz:
Feb 28, 2008 BOA Mtg
Link to PDF
March 11, 2008, Unoffiical Report of the Cmte on Leg. Matters
Link to PDF
By the way, I think that any property owner, whether it’s an absentee landlord or not, needs to do their part for clearing their sidewalks. It is in the public interest to maintain clear pathways, so all tax-payers should support services to help those who are not physically nor financially able to shovel.
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Aren’t tickets issued if you do not shovel your walkway? I believe that if someone falls on your walkway due to snow or ice they can make a claim on your home owner’s insurance.
By the way, I am for the new parking regulations as my street gets packed with out of state plates daily but especially during snow storms and December /31-April1 (when street cleaning ends).
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If tickets are issued consistently, they don’t seem to motivate constant offenders to mend their ways.
I don’t want to get hurt and then sue someone!
See
http://www.somervillevoices.org/2009/03/29/public-health-safety/somerville-snow-removal/ See Did Barry and his wife sue anyone? If they’d lost the child, would a lawsuit have fixed everything?
I want safe sidewalks, and I’m proposing a way for the city to fix the problem and make a profit.
See also http://www.universalhub.com/node/24181
And Janine, if you need permit parking in your neighborhood, maybe you should have it–in your neighborhood. But lots of neighborhoods have it whether they need it or not, and the city has been rather unresponsive to widespread complaints.
Kathy
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I believe landlord/occupants don’t have to clear the sidewalk until 12 hours of the storm. Since it’s technically still snowing, landlords don’t have to clear sidewalk yet.
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Knut, according to this CoS webpage:
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Absolutely. But my first post was a day or two after a light snowfall, when anyone with any intention of shoveling would have done so.
This will never be perfect. People are at work when snow falls, and people are walking the streets while snow is still falling. If the city did everything right, and we were all very conscientious, there would still be icy sidewalks and people who fell and got hurt. But it would be much rarer.
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I think Kathy has a great solution here. It’s practical and self-funding, although maybe it should be nine hours instead of six because of the problem of people being away at work when the snow stops falling.
I wonder whether youth organizations like Teen Empowerment would get behind this, since their members would be the obvious — easiest — to hire.
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So, you folks want more taxes and fees? As long as it’s on the “other guy” then it’s ok, right? In this case the “other guy” being property owners.
Question: who will deem a sidewalk clean enough? You want the city to now hire “street cleaning” enforcers? The parking enforcement officers do such a bangup job thjat we should follow that non-corrupt & fair model, right?
Good lord. This city has really gone down hill with all the kooks that have moved here over the last 20 years. Do all progressives in this city rent (and hate property owners/developers), not own a car (and hate those that do) and all have a sense of entitlement (and hate those that work and generate revenue)? Or is it just the folks on this blog?
Sadly, how true this is now…
“Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be
much easier to deal with.” (‘Atlas Shrugged’ 1957)
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There was a discussion about this issue earlier on this or a similar site. The basic rule currently is that the occupants (not owners, although they are the ones who seem to get ticketed) must clear snow within a certain amount of time of the snow ending. There is a proposal to change that to both increase fines for repeated offenses and also to change the timeframe to count from the beginning of the snow, not the end. I am not sure of the status of that.
If it makes anyone feel better, I have been ticketed for not shoveling when I was out of town and it snowed unexpectedly. I also know of others who have been ticketed. But I don’t think a property owner is necessarily liable for someone slipping and falling on a public sidewalk- although I guess the owner could always be sued and see what happens.
In general I think most people (except some landlords) do a good job clearing. The city properties are a mixed bag but I think they are not bad. The basic problem is that there is just no place to put the snow in a crowded city, so it ends up being hard to fully clear all the sidewalks and roads.
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Jeff, I own my property and am responsible for the sidewalk leading to my door. If the mailman, or anyone, were to fall from ice or snow, they can file a claim against my homeowner’s insurance. If you fall on public/city property, the most you could get from the city is $5000. I learned this the hard way when my two year old son fell at the Walnut Street park in July 2009 and broke his leg. The bricks were wet and loose and the city did nothing.
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Janine- That’s what I meant to say. Thanks for clarifying the difference. And the $5000 maximum liability limit applies to both public roads and public sidewalks but does not apply to private property owners- only the city.
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This brings me to something I’ve been thinking about lately. In the dear old Somerville I’m becoming a bit nostalgic for of late, you could occasionally run over the meter without getting a ticket, and the ticket would not be that high. Now, I think we should be responsible citizens about things like keeping our sidewalks clear, but what if I hurt my back? Sometimes a little slack is a friendly thing.
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“Xumi,” my wife and I own our home and I think Kathy does, too. So the “other guy” is us. We also have cars. And we moved here a lot more than 20 years ago.
But what I like about Kathy’s idea is that it’s not all about punishing those who don’t shovel their walks. It’s about getting the sidewalks cleared.
It rarely takes more than 15 minutes to clear a sidewalk. We could afford to pay teens well, add enough overhead to cover the clerical work, and solve the problem without high fines.
And some local kids would have an occasional job on a day the schools are closed.
Linda, I’m all for giving people slack and not having snow monitors standing around with stopwatches waiting for the grace period to expire. But if you hurt your back, the best thing is to let the city’s young snow shovelers do the work for you!
It might be possible to set it up so you can call City Hall and ask for the help. You would still pay for the service, but maybe you would pay less than the fine.
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Just like everybody else in America, our kids think their time is too valuable for manual labor like shoveling. Even if they could use the money, it just isn’t cool to do that kind of work. I say we skip middle school and establish work camps for that age group. Many teachers of those kids would agree. Fresh air and exercise is the only real good they can absorb during the hormone rages anyway. But, seriously, maybe we can give free pizza and iPods for shoveling crews.
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OK, we’ve changed the subject — but largely abolishing certain grades in favor of public-service work been one of my pet utopian proposals for a long, long time . . . and then an almost-mandatory year or two of real-world employment before college, so people go back to school with a realistic sense of the alternative. I’m not so sure about the second part: it might be the end of liberal arts, which I value, and most privileged kids would just work for daddy or mommy or a family connection. But there’s something sketchy about an uninterrupted 16-or-more-year march through a school environment that bears so little resemblance to real life and adulthood.
And, back to the topic, I’m sure there are still Somerville kids who’d be happy to earn some easy money putting their strong backs to community use. Sad to say, there may not be many of them in the neighborhood where Linda and I live. Some of them might have to walk over here, but I remember, with some pleasure, being young and eager to challenge a storm.
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Just for the record, I own a two-family house and a car and have lived in the same neighborhood for 35 years, 31 of them in this same building.
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Alain/Linda, that’s fine…. and no one will argue with the absentee landlord or the people who never, ever shovel their walks. The issue is that we already laws now that punish them (from Barry’s post above):
RESIDENTS’ RESPONSIBILITIES FOR SIDEWALKS
■Residents must shovel, salt or sand their sidewalks when it snows.
■Residents have six hours between sunrise and sunset after the snow stops to shovel sidewalks.
■Residents are not allowed to shovel snow into the street.
■Not complying with these provisions could result in a $25.00 fine
Let’s have the city enfoce those laws before we decide to enact more stringent laws and maybe the city can be held accountable too. Some of the most dangerous walkways are on city property.
I am very wary of our city government runnning more amuck – we see it now with overzealous parking enforcement, trash enforcement, etc. I am unwilling to give the city another reason to create more laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and create, out of law-abiding citizens, a city of law-breakers – and then they (city govt) just cash in more and becoming even more entrenched.
It’s a slippery slope to ask the city to be our nannies and I am unwilling to allow it to happen. Ticket the obvious scofflaws, but please, please do not beg the city to tax, fine or fee us into the ground any more than they already are. Please.
It must be nice to be one of the 43% of the folks who now pay NO federal tax! That isn’t me, so give us taxpayers a break.
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I think Alain and I have both said this several times, but the point isn’t really to punish people–it’s to achieve cleaner sidewalks. If the city had a plan for actually cleaning the sidewalks, which it doesn’t, it might help.
Yesterday my 26-year-old daughter stopped by. She had a bad knee after slipping. Today I went back to work, and the person I socialize with the most had a bruised hip after falling. When my mother needed to be near one of her children, I discouraged the idea of her living here largely because she would have been a prisoner in the winter.
The goal is safer walks for four or five months of the year. I want the city to sell a service, sometimes without permission, rather than just punishing people, which doesn’t seem to be working.
One perennial offender in my neighborhood is a large multi-family unit on College Ave., a heavily trafficked street on a hill. Last I heard, the owner lived in Florida. I learned this one year when she had conscientious tenants and I saw them shoveling and thanked them.
(How do you ticket “the occupants” of a 6- or 12-family building that might easily house over a dozen unrelated people?)
And by the way, Linda (another poster on the topic) is my neighbor, and her (two-family-house-and-car-owning) family was enormously helpful to me the year my back went out and I had a host of other problems. Other neighbors often help out, and in the last storm a tenant took a first cut at the driveway even though I’m the only one who uses it. Community-based solutions are wonderful, but they don’t always cover the whole territory.
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I agree with Xumi. Enforce the ordinace currently on the books before making any changes or additions to the ordinance. This city has become to crazy with a rule or this and a rule for that.
Kathye, off topic but we received a ticket for garbage outside for removal. We live in a 3 unit condo and it was someone else’s garbage in one of the other units. Regardless of how many apartments or people living there, just get the ticket written. If I was a tenant, I would pay it and take it off the rent if my landlord was a jerk.
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Safer, less icy sidewalks: THE POINT.
Punishing offenders: NOT THE POINT and actually quite irrelevant if if doesn’t fix the problem.
I worded my initial post hoping to make it clear that I consider the latest parking regulations rather oppressive, and that perhaps the city could raise revenue in a way more useful to its citizens. Zumi seems to agree with me about the new parking regulations. Janine D. does not.
I AM A LANDLORD (sic) and somewhat reluctantly accept responsibility for my tenants’ trash disposal habits.
I am grateful that I have had excellent, although changing, tenants for several decades and that we are allies in all the issues we are discussing here.
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Well folks, it looks like our property taxes are going up again this year. And some of you want the city (and state and federal) government to more agressively ticket/fine us? Besides giving raises and paying all the polticial hacks off – what are they doing with the money we’re giving them now?
http://www.somervillema.gov/NewsDetail.cfm?instance_id=1546
The new rates, though slightly increasing, reflect a smaller overall percentage change than for Fiscal Year 2009: the residential tax rate will increase by $0.59, or 5.1 percent, as opposed to last year’s 7 percent increase; the commercial tax rate will increase by $1.19, or 5.2%. The net additional tax paid in 2010 by the owner of an average two-family home receiving the residential exemption will be only 3.5 percent, or about $36 per quarter (around $150 a year).
All I can say to this is….
Thank you, sir! May I have another?!!!
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No matter how the Voice of City Hall crafts his press releases, every single fee, fine and tax has gone up in this city. Yet the Mayor and his cronies continue to take tax payer paid for trips to Morocco and beyond.
Don’t be fooled folks. Somehow these trips are beign paid for out of city funds. If the Mayor’ Champion wants to refute that, show us the credit card receipts from the Mayor’s trip. Then maybe I’ll believe it.
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Somerspeak, we finally agree on something! These trips are a huge waste of my taxpayer dollars and I want to see receipts for these excursions. What on earth does Joe think he is accomplishing?
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Please, time for a new thread! You’ve left safe sidewalks and parking far behind.
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You know that this type of work could be done by the young healthy unemployed people for a few hrs a week. I would gladly do it for the elderly or needy, except the state of CA who is currently paying me unemployment wont let me do any volunteer work less I lose my $450 a week unemployment money.
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How crazy is that? Can you elaborate? You can’t do VOLUNTEER work?
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Please start a new thread.
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Yes unemployment forms state:
Did you work or earn any money whether you were paid or not – hence volunteer work would be unpaid work and might disqualify you from getting unemployment benefits.
Stupid I know, but buy all means we should continue to let illegals get these underpaid jobs, instead of letting people work a few hrs a week for unemployment.
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As I walked over some very icy sidewalks yesterday, it occurred to me that a big part of the problem is dealing with the ice that forms after a snow-thaw-freeze cycle. This can happen even in places where the snow has been properly shoveled. Not all residents adequately use sand, although the City does make it available at many intersections in those large blue bins. Perhaps the DPW, a contractor, or students could be hired to spread sand on sidewalks to speed up the melting process and make the icy spots less slippery.
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