City holds sidewalk workshop

City staff working on plan for $11 million in sidewalk improvements.

As part of the city’s effort to enhance the sidewalk system in Siloam Springs, city staff held a public workshop on trails and sidewalks in the Siloam Springs Library on Tuesday evening.

The workshop outlined a plan city staff presented in September that established a map of future sidewalk projects in the city. The plan calls for 18 miles of new five-foot sidewalks and 10.4 miles of eight-foot trails. At a cost of $80.22 per linear foot of sidewalk, the improvements would cost about $11 million.

City staff has identified about 90 different sidewalk and trail projects, two of which were completed with the Mt. Olive Street diet. Staff proposed a plan to complete between $100,000 and $200,000 of projects over the next three years. The plan is to re-evaluate the city’s needs after that three years and go from there, Senior Planner Ben Rhoads said.

The workshop included boards that explained the project and showed the metric city staff used to determine the priority of different sections of sidewalk.

Several staff members were also on hand to answer questions and hear comments. A drop box was also provided for anonymous comments.

Fifty-nine members of the community attended the event, and both Rhoads and city Engineer Justin Bland said they represented a good cross section of the community.

Bland said he heard a lot of enthusiasm about new sidewalks.

“That was the common thread, that we need more sidewalks and we need to get it going,” Bland said.

Rhoads said something that stood out to him was the priority placed on integrating the East Main Street area with downtown and connecting it with sidewalks.

Bland and Rhoads encouraged people who see things like broken handrails or sidewalks in disrepair to notify city staff on the city website’s “fix it form.” The form can be found at www.siloamsprings.com/formcenter/fix-it-form-8/fixit-form-53.

The next step for the project will be approval from the board, Bland said. A date has not been set for that yet.

Michael Burchfiel/Siloam Sunday Siloam Springs residents gathered in the city library on Tuesday to learn about the city’s upcoming efforts to improve area sidewalks.