By Robert Cox
rcox@perryvillenews.com
The Perryville Board of Aldermen on Tuesday gave final approval to a new project that will allow city residents who do not have a sidewalk on their property to choose a contractor, have one installed and be reimbursed by the city.
According to city administrator Brent Buerck, the new plan will operate similarly to the city’s “Project Dry Basement,” which allowed residents with documented sewer backups caused by heavy rains to choose a plumber to install a backflow preventer and the city would pay for the installation.
“It seems to work pretty well,” Buerck said. “The concept is similar here. The city engineer’s office will look at local pricing and recent bids and determine what the appropriate cost per square foot of concrete is, and then the individual homeowner or property owner can approach a contractor of their choosing to do that installation, up to that price.”
The new plan was spurred by responses to a city survey from 2015 and is part of an initiative to make Perryville more pedestrian friendly, particularly in certain neighborhoods.
“This is something that’s been important to the city for a little while,” Buerck said. “We’ve included a question on the current survey, but also past surveys to gauge the importance to the citizens as well. People seem to like sidewalks. There’s a lot of support for sidewalks.”
The goal of the project, Buerck said, is quite simple. “The goal is to eliminate the gaps that are still in the system,” Buerck said, “and for folks that want to walk their neighborhood to say, ‘I have a gap here, but if I get my sidewalk fixed, I can connect these two houses,’ which then gives us a whole block of sidewalk.”
That connection is the heart of the project.
“In the past, property owners had the ability to decide if they wanted a sidewalk or not, and they had the ability to pay for that sidewalk entirely at their choosing,” Buerck said. “Now we’ve taken more ownership of the system saying, look, ‘This is important for our health. This is important for our sense of neighborhood.’ But it’s also important for folks who may have disabilities and cannot drive. We want to connect the sidewalks throughout town and if we are willing to assume the costs, we hope that the public would be willing to contact us.”
In recent years, the city explored different ways to extend sidewalks, including using city crews.
“At one time, we thought we would send out our own crew and then we would decide as a city where the gaps are that we needed to close,” Buerck said, “the goal being to connect long stretches of sidewalks. If we could connect those gaps in the middle, we could really extend the sidewalk. So we’ve done some of that, but we thought that it might be a better approach to allow people who want sidewalks to approach us and ask for the sidewalk instead of us approaching them and telling them we were going to put one in.”
This method will also ease the strain on the Public Works department, whose work crews often get pulled to other projects from leaf duty to water main breaks and road breaks.
“That’s why we tend to be slower than the other contractors are,” Buerck said.
For more information about the sidewalk project, city residents are encouraged to contact City Hall at 573-547-2594. To participate in the program, residents will have to fill out a short application.
As part of the consent agenda, the board also voted in favor of paying for approximately half of the cost — estimated at $15,000 — needed to make necessary sewer repairs at the Perry County Senior Center in Perryville.
The extent of the repairs became obvious last week, when plumbers were working to clear an obstruction. When the sewer line under the kitchen was excavated, it was discovered that a good portion had simply rotted away. As a result, the Senior Center, which normally delivers meals to more than 230 homebound seniors five times a week, would have to shut down its kitchen for at least two weeks while repairs, which include a synthetic liner, were made.
With the kitchen out of commission, senior center director Susan Foster and her staff were forced to develop alternative menus.
“Trying to come up with a menu that we can keep safe without a kitchen is tough,” Foster said last week. “We don’t have a way to keep anything warm.”
In other business, the board voted to enter into an agreement with the Missouri Department of Conservation in regard to a $10,000 Tree Resource Improvement and Maintenance grant to remove the Bradford pear trees and shrubs around the downtown square.
“This contract will make our partnership official,” Buerck said. “Several property owners have expressed their preferences [regarding which trees they’d like planted outside their property].”
