Inmates from the state prison picked up shovels and by midday Sunday cleared the state-owned sidewalk along Interstate 393 of snow, finishing the job even before adjacent city sidewalks were plowed.
The work, which Department of Corrections spokesman Jeff Lyons said was done by a handful of minimum-security inmates, marked the first evidence of a deal brokered Friday between the state and city of Concord.
After a protracted standoff, the state has agreed to remove ice and snow and treat the disputed sidewalk with deicing chemicals through May 30, according to a memorandum of agreement signed by the state Department of Transportation Commissioner Victoria Sheehan and Concord City Manager Tom Aspell.
The state-owned land nearby the Friendly Kitchen is along a direct route between resources for the city’s homeless residents. A disabled man was killed earlier this year while traveling in the roadway there because the sidewalk was impassable for his wheelchair. Prior to the agreement, the state took the position that it doesn’t plow sidewalks, while the city refused to do the state’s work.
For now, Lyons said, inmates at the state prison, which is located only about a mile from the short stretch of sidewalk in question, will do the shoveling.
But ultimately, the work will be completed by a contractor that the DOT hires using up to $5,000 of city money, according to the agreement.
“We haven’t secured a vendor yet, but in the interim, the Department of Corrections has stepped forward,” Bill Boynton, the DOT spokesman, said.
The agreement says the city will pay the cost – not more than $5,000 – for a third party the state hires to do the work. Therefore, after the city and state governments pointed their fingers at each other, they’ll each have a hand in this year’s solution.
That’s a departure from the expectation that the governments had until the first snowfall of the year. For most of the year, it appeared that the burden of clearing the sidewalk would fall to an unlikely party: the city’s only soup kitchen, the Friendly Kitchen.
After 52-year-old Gene Parker was killed on his way from the Friendly Kitchen to downtown, the soup kitchen’s board of directors stepped in this spring when neither the state nor the city budged. As recently as Dec. 4, Boynton and Aspell said they expected the Friendly Kitchen to assume the responsibility again this winter.
But the Friendly Kitchen worried that it would then be liable for any accidents that occur, opening itself up to lawsuits and difficulties in keeping its insurance.
“Over the course of a number of months, we had extensive conversations about engaging a contractor to maintain the sidewalk. But at the end of the day, the risk to our long-term ability to continue our critical mission was far too great,” the Friendly Kitchen said in a statement.
That put the discussion back to square one, prompting a host of letters to the editor in these pages over the first half of the month, suggesting that the city or the homeless residents themselves or someone just get the job done.
Aspell said he didn’t understand the people who believed the city should detour off its North Main Street routes to plow state property.
“It’s owned by somebody else who has a lot of money to be able to do this and has said, straightforward, they own it, they know it’s theirs, and they know there’s a federal requirement to do that,” Aspell said. “So how does it come to the city should do it? It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
With the relatively low priority the city sets for sidewalk plowing, it can sometimes have enough of a challenge keeping up with Mother Nature on its own sidewalks. That was in full view Sunday afternoon, where the prisoners’ work abruptly ended at city land.
To travel from the corner of I-393 to the Homeless Resource Center on North Main Street, for instance, one would have to break through 4-foot-tall banks of snow on the sidewalks created as private plows cleared driveways.
Advocates for pedestrians have recently recommended the city consider using overtime more readily to hasten sidewalk cleanup on weekends.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)