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Columbia City Council Considering "Point of Sale" Strategy for Sidewalk Funding

Chris Yunker
/
Flickr

Sidewalks all over Columbia will soon be under the City Council’s microscope.

City Council members and administrators will be meeting with the Columbia Board of Realtors next week to discuss ideas on how to fix the numerous sidewalks that need repair.

The meeting will include discussion over an idea the City Council referred to as the “point of sale” strategy. This strategy would require homeowners to pay for the sidewalk repair before they are allowed to sell. Columbia Board of Realtors CEO Brian Toohey said this has caused some concern.

“We don’t want this to cause problems with home sales. Especially if there is an issue where someone would need to fix their sidewalks and they’re not able to afford that repair and then it affects the sale of their home,” Toohey said.

Toohey said he’s planning to ask about the standard the city is going to have, if refinancing a home counts as a sale, and if there will be any relief for low-income type housing at Tuesday’s meeting.

Deputy City Manager Tony St. Romaine said this meeting is really just to get the ideas flowing to solve this sidewalk issue. For St. Romaine, this is a problem for a lot of people, especially people with disabilities who use the sidewalks on a daily basis to connect them to the rest of the city.

The main problem St. Romaine said he sees is that there isn’t any funding in place to get the sidewalks fixed in the near future.

“At the current rate of funding that we have, a very limited amount funding every year, I would say if we continue to utilize that limited amount of funding, you’re looking at a cycle of 80 to 100 years before we would even get around to each piece of sidewalk here in Columbia,” St. Romaine said.

St. Romaine did acknowledge that some places already implement the point of sale strategy and that there was mixed feedback. Other ideas he mentioned included looking at the Columbia’s existing general fund or going back to a strategy where the city would fix the sidewalks and tax the affected homeowners through a 10-year tax.

St. Romaine said there is no set timeline for fixing these sidewalks, but he did recognize the importance of getting it done as soon as possible.