Council to send draft sidewalk-control ordinance to committee amid downtown project planning

Struthers City Council members discussed a draft ordinance to establish a Sidewalk Enhancement Control Authority — SECA — intended to give the city authority to repair sidewalks that are located outside public easements when surveys show sidewalks encroach onto private property.

Bob explained that engineers provided a template ordinance to address situations in which a sidewalk lies beyond a city easement and that SECA would allow the city to obtain temporary access or otherwise repair affected sidewalks without separate easement agreements. “This is an ordinance that was given to us by our engineers for a project this upcoming. If they run into a situation where a sidewalk, for some reason or another, is not in the easement, you have to get temporary access to that property. Well, this will allow us to repair any sidewalks that are not in the easement,” Bob said.

Council members said they had not yet received the engineers’ template in full and that the ordinance’s chapters and section numbers remained blank in the draft. They agreed the item could wait for a committee meeting to fill in the blanks and to review the ordinance in detail. One council member said the city had hoped to pass an ordinance before a downtown project starts, but the downtown project’s bidding schedule is not expected to complete until later in the year, so the ordinance can proceed through committee and the normal three-reading process.

The caucus transcript shows the council referred the ordinance to the next committee meeting; no formal readings or votes were recorded in the caucus. The draft ordinance’s chapter number, codified ordinance section, and any emergency clause are not specified in the transcript.