Siloam Springs city staff is inviting residents to learn about efforts to enhance sidewalks and trails in town and give their opinions on needs facing the city.
The city will host a workshop from 5 to 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday at the library. The workshop will be come-and-go, with an array of informative displays and a place for visitors to submit opinions. City staff will also be present to take questions or hear concerns. There will also be a drop box for anonymous comments.
"That's very important," City Planner Ben Rhoads said. "We want feedback from the community. We want to see if we are missing something, is there a place we needed to focus more on, or whatever that area would be."
Rhoads said the workshop will not have a formal presentation, so residents are encouraged to attend, even if they have to come late. It should take around 30 minutes to see all of the displays and submit comments, he said.
Before the Board of Directors meeting on Sept. 6, directors and observers were given a presentation outlining the sidewalk needs facing the city. City staff proposed a plan 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, Rhoads said.
City Engineer Justin Bland said staff used a metric to help choose how important proposed sections of sidewalks are. Bland said staff used a scale that awarded points to sidewalk sections based on nearby population and proximity to points of interest, among other things.
General News on 10/23/2016