Portland sidewalk racket claims another victim
KOIN has a story up this week about a homeowner in Southeast Portland who just got written up by City Hall for $20,000 worth of sidewalk repairs. She doesn't have that kind of money lying around, and she wonders what she'll do.
Anyone who has owned property in an older neighborhood in this town for any length of time can sympathize. We've all been subjected to this.
Even if you agree that sidewalk maintenance should be a homeowner's responsibility, the way Portland goes about it is infuriating. There used to be inspectors combing the entire city writing out the citations on a regular basis. Every six years, I think it was. They flagged many small problems before they became bigger problems. But that ticked off a lot of voters, and so the City Council decided to make it so that the city would act on complaints only.
Well, guess what followed. The contractors who make a living doing the repairs started sending around their own minions, who would file complaints, sometimes as many as the city inspectors used to come up with. Then the City Hall types would show up and write the homeowner up like in the old days. It kept business pretty good.
Around the last time I got hit up this way, Kyle Iboshi at KGW discovered that many dozens of complaints in my neighborhood had been filed by just one guy. Iboshi tracked the guy down, and he swore he was not connected to a paving contractor in any way. But he wouldn't let KGW use his name or show his face on the air, and he offered no other reason for what he was doing, and so his version of events wasn't convincing at all.
After that, the city said it would limit the number of complaints any one person could file in a given period. But it was quite a while ago – I don't know if that's still the official policy.
Anyway, to get back to the woman with her $20,000 notice. The city tells you how much they are going to charge if they have to do the repairs. You get a period of time, in her case six months but it's usually shorter, to get the work done, or else the city does it and bills you. If you don't pay, they put a lien on your house.
Now, the paving weasels keep up on all the citations issued by the city, and so the poor lady will now be visited by several dudes who will offer to do the repairs for her for less than what the city is charging. But it will be, like, $50 less, so that she'll pay only $19,950 instead of $20,000.
The last time I went through this, one of the contractor salesmen told me that if I didn't hire his crew, they would be the ones that the city would have do the job anyway. According to the sales rep, the city doesn't have in-house crews do the work. They hire the same contractors that the homeowners would.
That, my friends, is what we from New Jersey call a racket.
And the scam doesn't stop with just the homeowners. All over town, at public expense, intersections are being replaced that absolutely don't need replacing. For example, on Northeast Fremont Street, they redid every curb at every corner a few years ago. Most of the old curbs had perfectly good wheelchair cut-outs already, but the city had somebody rip them all out, and put new ones in with yellow mats embedded in them. I don't know what the yellow mats are about; maybe they help visually impaired people. But they don't stay yellow for long. Within a year or two, they're the color of dirt.
Sidewalk maintenance in Portland is quite the situation. For a smart journalist with guts, there's a Pulitzer waiting. But it's a racket, so watch your back.
Portland is not as progressive as it thinks it is.
ReplyDeleteYour comments are right on the money. An additional angle is that the City of Portland won't let you remove a tree that is lifting up a sidewalk and replace it with a different tree that doesn't have such a problematically large root system. Thus, you are stuck replacing parts of the sidewalk every two or three years and enriching the concrete mob in the process. In Portland a property owner theoretically owns the land beneath the sidewalk and any strip between the sidewalk and the street. In practice, however, you have no property rights on that land. All you have is financial responsibility for maintaining it.
ReplyDeleteI studied this once as part of a neighborhood beef. Technically you "own" out to the middle of the street. If the street ever gets vacated, you get to really own it. Otherwise, you get nothing but grief starting at the public-right-of-way line.
DeleteSidewalks are a public right-of-way and should be maintained by the city. It would probably be better to not even have sidewalks than to have neglected, dangerous sidewalks.
DeleteAlso, another controversy, suppose people camp on your sidewalk. Are you liable for the damage they do? Who is responsible for ADA access? It's a libertarian fiasco, but Portland is supposed to be the most progressive city in the country.
Then, throw in the Urban Forestry nitwits, who went around giving away free trees for the parking strip (in the public right-of-way), misrepresenting what responsibilities the homeowner would have and planting trees guaranteed to tear up the walkways. Then, when the property owner arranges to have the tree removed at the expense of the utility company, and the Forestry Division inspector refuses to allow it, despite the tree being a designated nuisance tree in the city standards. It is tearing up the curbs on a major bicycle pathway street, as well as the walkways. I've got a bone to pick with the city.
ReplyDeleteThe Urban Forestry nitwits are the worst. They want to plant trees where trees unsuited for the space really shouldn't be planted. You see this all over Portland.
DeleteThe redo of the Fremont and other street corners was due to an ADA lawsuit the City lost.
ReplyDeleteThey could not possibly have been required to re-do wheelchair cutouts that were already there. That part of the job was pure pork.
DeleteHere is the settlement -
Deletehttps://www.portlandoregon.gov/article/688932
Eighty years ago, the bureaucratic “shakedown” was directed at the gamblers and pimps. Not little old ladies on fixed income.
ReplyDeleteThe ramps that are being replaced fall into the not up to current code category. I believe if a pedestrian was injured on a faulty sidewalk in front of your house you are liable so there is incentive to keep it maintained. When the scooters show up on the sidewalk at my commercial property in SE I put them in the middle of the 7th Avenue . They are usually parked in thoughtless manner in the middle of the sidewalk. I assume I am liable if someone trips and hurts themselves on one of the things.
ReplyDeleteYes, I assume that there is some code somewhere that provided cover for the massive waste of money on Fremont Street. That doesn't make it right. I'm no tort lawyer, but you might want to ask for some legal advice before you go moving a scooter into the middle of a street.
ReplyDeleteI tripped on a sidewalk that was 2" higher than the adjacent one and fractured my knee. This happened in Cambridge MA. I had an attorney look into it and there didn't seem to be any recourse. Tree roots and frost heaves were the culprit.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you're in favor of a city-wide sidewalk and street property tax. Wouldn't that be more fair than the current bizarro system???
ReplyDeleteOur neighborhood was hit with over 60 sidewalk complaints several years ago which caused an uproar. My partner and I had to DIY two sidewalk squares as we couldn't find a contractor willing to do such a small job. It took months for us to figure it out and it still looks like shit.
The rumor is that the city inspectors were trigged by an elderly lady who was badly injured in a fall. She eventually moved out of the neighborhood.