To the editor: It appears easy — a house owner will get a mortgage, hires a contractor and fixes the sidewalk. Nevertheless, trying deeper, it’s actually fairly sophisticated. (“How L.A. can repair our scary sidewalks for the Olympics,” Opinion, Sept. 10)
The image with UCLA professor Donald Shoup’s op-ed article exhibits the necessity to take away a big tree; that might require a avenue closure. Utilities have to be protected and avenue harm repaired. There’s in depth excavation wanted to take away the roots. I can simply think about the allowing nightmare.
There are the explanation why town of Los Angeles is up to now behind on repairing sidewalks, and these and different points are amongst them. Dumping this situation on the house owner shouldn’t be a very good answer.
We have to discover out what instruments town wants to repair its sidewalks and why the instruments it has appear to be under-utilized.
Patrick Randall, Newbury Park
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To the editor: Possibly I’m simply an excessive amount of of a simpleton relating to caring for the problems set earlier than me, a enterprise proprietor of greater than 50 years. My life has been spent planning to resolve issues, resolving these issues after which shifting on. The town of Los Angeles shouldn’t be able to this thought course of, apparently.
I’ll give a working example: A couple of months in the past, crews had been dispatched to my neighborhood for one more copper cable theft restore. A part of the train was to “fortify” the prevailing underground pull containers towards vandalism.
I’m undecided what number of tons of of hundreds of {dollars} had been spent on not simply fortifying the containers (which meant marking their location within the new concrete), however the utter stupidity of putting in tons of of toes of recent sidewalk and leaving the buckled, ski jump-like parts intact.
In his op-ed article, Shoup mentions a 2016 lawsuit that resulted in a $1.4-billion judgment requiring L.A. to restore its sidewalks. He notes that since then, $35 million has been paid out for sidewalk-related accidents.
The truth that California legislation makes non-public owners chargeable for public works upkeep points on public sidewalks adjoining to non-public property is hideous.
And don’t get me began on switching avenue lights to photo voltaic, the place doable. I’ve been stonewalled for years on that situation.
Ricc Bieber, Northridge
