Workers with Roger Langeliers Construction Co. pour and level concrete for a sidewalk along NE Third Street in Bend in fall 2016. (Bulletin file photo)

City of Bend crews are working to revamp the sidewalks on SE Third Street where segments of shoddy or nonexistent sidewalks make travel risky for anyone in a wheelchair, and even those on foot.

Over the next several months, crews will bring curb ramps, sidewalks and bus stops on Third Street between Wilson Avenue to Powers Road into compliance with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. In total, the $3.5 million project will rebuild or create 10,000 feet of sidewalk, 45 curb ramps, 10 bus stops and accessible pedestrian signals at every major crossing, according to the city. Construction will pause for the winter but is scheduled to be finished in July 2017.

This is one of hundreds of projects Bend will have to undertake to make sidewalks and curb ramps ADA-compliant citywide. In 2001, four people in Bend filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice saying that Bend wasn’t accessible. Three years later, the city reached a settlement with the DOJ, which gave Bend 10 years to fix buildings, sidewalks and curb ramps. Over a 10-year span beginning in 2004, the city spent nearly $8 million to comply with the 1990 ADA law.

The U.S. DOJ stopped monitoring the city’s progress in 2014, despite a backlog of thousands of uncompleted projects. The city is still chipping away at the list, but doesn’t know when all of it will be finished, or how much it will cost.

“Every year we’re getting better,” said Karin Morris, the city’s accessibility manager. “It’s really those (residential) streets that are the problem. There were a lot of neighborhoods that were built in the boom, and there wasn’t a good inspection process.”

Making the city accessible for wheelchair users means upgrading sidewalks and curb ramps. Out of nearly 8,500 curb ramps citywide, nearly 3,200 were ADA compliant as of Jan. 2016, said Morris. The majority of ADA-compliant curbs were rebuilt or created in the last five years, she said.

Bend’s streets division aims to build or rebuild about 200 curb ramps each year, according to city documents. Meanwhile, it works to build about a half-mile of sidewalk each year.

But measuring how far the city has come to make sidewalks accessible is tricky, Morris said.

There are a number of Bend streets that have sidewalks that aren’t continuous, or jump from one side of the road to the other. But if there’s not a sidewalk there, the city isn’t on the hook to fix it, Morris said.

“There is no requirement that forces cities to build sidewalks where they don’t exist,” said Morris.

By 2018, the city says it plans to create or rebuild 7 miles of sidewalks and about 1,100 curb ramps. In the near future, some of the big projects will be installing continuous sidewalks on both sides of 14th Street and Galveston Avenue, Morris said.

Morris said it’s difficult to figure out how much the city has spent on projects total, and how much money it will need to make all streets ADA-compliant. The city’s Accessibility Construction Fund, which is funded by a fee on sewer and water bills, provides about $500,000 for accessibility construction projects each year.

— Reporter: 541-633-2160, mriker@bendbulletin.com