Lawmakers approve laser scanning for sidewalks
KINGSTON, N.Y. » The city will spend approximately $20,000 on a laser scanning process that will survey the condition of some of Kingston’s sidewalks.
During a meeting Tuesday, the Common Council unanimously adopted a resolution to transfer $20,000 from the city budget’s contingency fund to the Engineering Offices’s budget to pay for a limited scan of some city streets. The work is to be performed by Maser Consulting P.A. of Albany.
City Engineer Ralph Swenson said the agreement with Maser still needs to be finalized and he is not yet sure when the scanning will begin.
“Hopefully soon,” Swenson said Friday.
During a meeting last month, Swenson told the Common Council’s Finance and Audit Committee that the city has a lot of broken sidewalks or ones in otherwise poor condition. To manually measure them all would take years, he said. Swenson said the sidewalk condition must be mapped as part of the city’s efforts to come into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA.
Maser’s laser scanning will automatically measure the sidewalks to quickly collect the data the city needs. The limited scan will allow the city to see what kind of information would be provided through the process.
Maser would charge the city $18,300 for the service. Of that, $12,500 would be for the mobile mapping survey, while the remainder would be for geographic information system data migration, according to a proposal from the company.
Under the proposal, Maser would “deliver a design-grade base map and surface model of the two highlighted areas based on feature extraction detailing structure face, sidewalk, curb/gutter, drive and ramp cuts and grades, roadway surface points, sign, street light, power pole, visible utilities and existing paint stripe locations.”
The firm would laser scan the Broadway, West O’Reilly Street, Mary’s Avenue and Andrew Street block in Midtown, as well as the Uptown area of John, Crown and North Front streets.
The council on Tuesday also unanimously adopted a resolution to transfer $20,000 from the city budget’s contingency fund to the City Clerk’s Office budget to pay for repair of the air conditioning system at City Hall on Broadway.
The system stopped working June 12, Swenson had said. He said a contractor identified the problem as coming from a circuit breaker switch and that a compressor assembly had also failed.
Repairs were made to get the system working at partial capacity.