City Investing Nearly $3 Million to Repair Sidewalks this Construction Season

The City of Medford is investing nearly $3 million in repairing and renovating sidewalks during the fall 2023 construction season, Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn announced. With the ongoing Capital Improvement work happening throughout the City, including complete street projects in Haines Square and Riverside Avenue, the City’s engineering and DPW teams have helped manage nearly $8 million in infrastructure work this construction season. This amounts to 8,800 feet of sidewalk that will be repaired by the end of this construction season.

About one third of the total sidewalk funding, roughly $800,000, is being used to address sidewalk issues logged by constituents in the City’s See Click Fix platform that also coincide with sidewalk locations identified in the 2021 Sidewalk Assessment Report that Mayor Lungo-Koehn commissioned in her first term. Crews from Cassidy Corporation have been out at various locations milling portions of sidewalks, pouring new concrete and establishing new accessible curb cuts on 37 streets this season. Work is tentatively scheduled to be concluded by December, weather permitting. You can find a list of these sidewalk locations on the City’s engineering webpage under projects.

“We learned through our sidewalk assessment that the City has an estimated backlog repairs of over $30 million due to decades of neglect,” Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn said. “We’re working through the areas that are consistently identified by the public as hazardous and coupling that work with adjacent locations listed in the sidewalk assessment. Additionally, we are holding utility companies accountable and demanding that they follow through on completing street and sidewalk work as promised. We also have larger complete street projects, one just completed at Haines Square and another underway on Riverside Avenue. We’re leveraging all available resources to ensure our pedestrian walkways are safe and navigable but there’s more to do.”

More than half of the remaining funding, approximately $1.1 million, has been invested in repairing sidewalks as part of the City’s various Capital Improvement Projects. These projects include:

• Riverside Avenue: $350,000 (includes curbing, sidewalk, driveway, ADA curb ramps)
• Pinkert Street: $320,000 (includes curbing, sidewalk, driveway, ADA curb ramps, stump removal)
• Woodruff Avenue & Henley Street: $100,000 (includes curbing, sidewalk, driveway, ADA curb ramps)
• Stump Removal Contracts: $343,000 (includes curbing, sidewalk, stump removal

“Medford, like many other municipalities in the commonwealth had not properly planned for adequate sidewalk and street maintenance but thankfully the administration and city council is committed to thoughtfully addressing this issue and investing resources, time and funding to fix it,” City Engineer Owen Wartella said.

To continue this work into the next year, the Mayor submitted a $1.5 million bond for additional sidewalk repairs to the City Council at the beginning of this year, which the council approved. The funding in 2024 will be deployed to address sidewalks and curb cuts on Salem Street.

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