Bloomington approves sidewalk master plan

Posted on October 17, 2015

By Joe Ragusa

BLOOMINGTON – The Bloomington City Council has approved a sidewalk master plan that aims to fix roughly 67 miles of sidewalks in the city.

The plan will cost $4.1 million to repair sidewalks deemed to have a rating of four or worse on a scale of 1-10. Another $7.4 million will be spent installing or replacing sidewalk ramps.

Public Works Director Jim Karch told the city council that funding is sorely needed for sidewalks.

“Some of you would email me and say we have a concern, then we would say, ‘Oh, that’s great, we’ll barricade it until next year,'” Karch said. “That’s really not a place where we as a city want to be. We ran out of funding and whenever we got extra funding, we’d spend it and in a month, it was gone.”

The plan was approved unanimously at Monday’s city council meeting.

Details of the plan are available at www.cityblm.org/sidewalks.

Joe Ragusa can be reached at [email protected].

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