How wide should a sidewalk be? Do carports have to match the design of your house? Those were two of the questions the Cortez City Council considered at their meeting Sept. 8.
The council was asked to approve a number of changes to the land use code recommended by the city planning department. Some of them were very minor, but others prompted discussion.
The council ultimately approved the changes, making only a couple of small tweaks to them.
The issue that caused the most debate was city sidewalks. The Americans with Disabilities Act recommends that sidewalks be at least five feet wide to accommodate wheelchairs, and the city code says sidewalks should be five feet in width except in the Central Business District, where they should be nine feet wide.
But many older sidewalks in Cortez are only about three feet wide.
City Planning Director Nancy Dosdall told the council that the new land use code provided an exemption for someone building on an undeveloped parcel if the parcels on either side of it had three-foot-wide sidewalks.
“Infill or redevelopment projects shall design and construct new sidewalks in conformance with the existing sidewalks adjacent to the development site regardless of whether they conform with the standards in this section,” the code said.
She recommended that exemption be eliminated and all infill or development projects be required to have five-foot-wide sidewalks.
“There was concern we should not be allowing people to build a substandard sidewalk at any time in the city,” Dosdall said. “The suggestion now is to eliminate that and require people to put in five feet even if there is three feet on either side of them.”
Council member April Randle said this would add to the cost of construction and create a mixture of different-sized sidewalks.
“I don’t understand the benefit of. . . putting this added expense on homeowners with older homes and making a patchwork look of things,” Randle said.
“If you allow the three feet you’ll never get up to ADA compliance,” said council member Bill Lewis.
Director of Public Works Casey Simpson said every year some residents seek to have their aging sidewalks replaced under the city’s concrete cost-share program.
“If we continue to allow this existing three-foot infrastructure to go back in, you’ll have these inholdings of three feet that never go anywhere,” he said.
He said the goal is to eventually have sidewalks that are consistent in size and wider.
“You hope to one day have a full length of sidewalks that a person in a wheelchair could effectively use,” Simpson said. “It is a long-term vision. In the short term it does seem like it will be patchworky.”
Mayor Dennis Spruell said the city could potentially be liable if someone were injured on a non-ADA-compliant sidewalk the city allowed to be built.
City Manager Drew Sanders told KSJD that developing wheelchair-accessible sidewalks citywide will take time.
“We fully recognize this isn’t going to happen overnight, but it has to start somewhere,” he said. “There will be uphill battles and shortfalls.”
There are neighborhoods in the city where it isn’t possible to build sidewalks that are five feet wide because of the way the streets are constructed or because of light poles that are close to the curbs.
“We know that,” Sanders said. “We’ve had those discussions – what do we do with this and that?”
Five feet is the standard for sidewalks now, he said, “and we’ve got to start the ball rolling. Some of it’s going to take decades.
“It’s not that easy. I wish it was.”
The city is indeed a patchwork of sidewalks of different widths. The one along the west side of Mildred next to City Park, which many people use, is just a little over three feet wide.
“If you’re walking on it and a squirrel goes by you, you have to hop over,” Sanders joked, laughing.
“That’s part of the old, old standard. If and when it needs to be replaced, it will have to be at five feet and we know that.”
Sanders said if city or other public funds are being spent on sidewalks, they need to meet the standards.
After the sidewalk discussion at the Sept. 8 meeting, the council moved to the topic of carports, ultimately choosing to eliminate language that required carports in front yards to be built so they appear to match the construction materials used for the house.
“The only design standards left in our land use code apply to carports,” Dosdall said. “I’m not sure how that stayed in.”
She said there are a lot of carports in the city and “very few, if any, meet that standard, so when people come in [to get a building permit for a carport], it’s pretty hard to explain to them why they would have to do that.”
It was at least a couple of decades ago that the council adopted the requirement that accessory carports in a front yard appear to match the design of the homes where they are built. Since then, countless carports have gone up in Cortez that don’t follow that.
“We’re trying to match what’s actually happening in the city and what people are actually wanting to do,” Dosdall told the council.
In a phone interview, Dosdall told KSJD that she isn’t sure she’s ever seen a carport in Cortez that meets that standard, so it made sense to eliminate it.
People are supposed to obtain a building permit when they plan to put up a carport. “We’ve been telling them, don’t worry so much about the design standards,” Dosdall said.
She said, even though the carport design standards are being dropped, people still need to get a building permit, even for carports that are built from kits.
“It’s important because they could blow away if you don’t anchor them correctly,” she said.
Among the other proposed changes to the code were one that says fences around properties in wildland-urban interface areas may have to be fire-resistant; and a regulation saying nonfunctional turf or nonfunctional artificial turf are not allowed for projects, except individual properties in single-family developments or multi-family developments under 13 units in size.
The council voted 7 to 0 to accept the changes.
Gail Binkly is a career journalist who has worked for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Cortez Journal, and was the editor of the Four Corners Free Press, based in Cortez.