Civic tenacity gets a sidewalk fixed

Gabe Fineman deserves our thanks for going the extra mile ( no pun intended) to get the Van Ness sidewalk bordering UDC campus between Connecticut Avenue and Reno Road repaired. He wrote to Forest Hills Connection:

[box]For those of us that walk up Van Ness Street toward Wisconsin Avenue from Connecticut, the good news is that the missing and raised bricks in the sidewalk in front of UDC have been fixed by the District Department of Transportation. Many thanks for the intervention of Dee Smith, Director of Constituent Services for Councilperson Mary Cheh.

The yellow police tape and trash barrels in front of the wide walkway at the west end of UDC (just before the drilling site) is to keep delivery trucks from driving over the sidewalk and destroying the newly fixed bricks. UDC assures us that they will replace this temporary barrier with one more friendly to pedestrians and bikes.[/box]

This is the process he went through to get DDOT to fix this obstacle course:

[box]I put in a service request August 20th, got no response and wrote to Cheh’s office on September 3rd. They told me that this was a complex problem that would probably not be fixed until December. A work order was put in almost at once that was closed out on September 16th with only some of the repairs having been made.

I got the work order (and names of people who worked on the repair from a FOIA request on October 7th.

I asked for the work order to be reopened or reissued because so much work was undone. No answer except a request to send a smaller pdf of the work to be done.

Then I sent an email on October 17th saying that one of the many unfixed holes broke a wheelchair. Late last Friday [October 23rd] or over the weekend, all of the bricks were fixed. Today [October 28th] I wrote thanking them.[/box]

Thank you again for showing us how you handled this problem and hopefully others will follow your lead. – Marlene Berlin