Councilmember: Businesses Should Share Sidewalk Repair Costs With City

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — In order to move forward with repairing nearly half of Los Angeles' sidewalks, a Los Angeles City councilmember proposed a motion that private businesses would share the cost of repairs with the city.

Property owners would pay 50-75 percent of the costs while the city would cover the rest, Councilmember Bob Blumenfield's proposal says.

"We have 10,000 miles of sidewalks in our city and 40 percent of them — over 4,600 — are in disrepair so the cost is enormous," Blumenfield told KNX1070.

"We set aside $10 million this year and we're trying to up that number for sidewalk repair," he said. "But we need partnerships to make those dollars stretch further."

The program would involve restricted commercial areas such as "pedestrian corridors, transit routes and transit hubs," according to Blumenfield. Under the motion, the Department of Public Works' Bureau of Street Services would create an incentive for property owners that would include reducing their share of the costs depending on how quickly they acted.

"The City Attorney will find that the property owner is required to fix their street, but back in 1973 the city stopped requiring it and started paying for it so there's some ambiguity there and that ambiguity has caused a little bit of inertia," he said. "And my idea is to say let's get rid of the inertia, let's create a program where we can have a partnership and just get it done because it's not tolerable to have the sidewalks the way that they are."