Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh’s recent announcement to crack down on code violations falls in line with promises he made on the campaign trail to improve “quality of life” for city residents.

Since his inauguration in early January, Walsh’s administration has been actively enforcing laws banning snow plowers from pushing snow onto sidewalks. Snow-covered sidewalks could force pedestrians onto streets.

Syracuse.com reported that Walsh’s strategy to handle snow also includes plans to hire children to shovel hard-to-reach areas, encourage residents to report unshoveled sidewalks and direct city department heads to clear snow around all Syracuse-owned properties.

“When we encounter stormy weather, including snow, we will push it aside and keep moving forward,” Walsh said during his January state of the city address.

He said ticketing and towing will be a primary method for enforcing public safety issues, targeting 29 “priority streets,” including routes around hospitals and public safety buildings. He added that property owners and plow operators who plow snow onto sidewalks will be penalized via stricter ticketing.

Some of those priority streets for ticketing and plowing are in the University Hill neighborhood. The 800 block of Sumner Avenue, the 500 block of Clarendon Street and the 100 block of Redfield Place are targeted areas for better snow management.

The mayor also said Syracuse’s Innovation Team will host a snow safety summit on Thursday at 6 p.m. at Dr. Weeks Elementary School in an attempt to develop long-term solutions for the city’s snow removal issues.

In his state of the city speech, Walsh said new leadership in Syracuse’s water and public works departments will start using different strategies to handle the city’s aging infrastructure.

Walsh said in his speech that he intends to implement a bike-sharing program in Syracuse. There are bike lanes throughout Syracuse, and Walsh said the city will be adding more lanes to help facilitate the new program. A city official previously told The Daily Orange that the program should be in place by the end of 2018.

The mayor’s transition team also created a full list of recommendations in a major report published last month that included the establishment of a Quality of Life Commission to address issues in communities such as, “beautification, ordinance enforcement, and nuisance crimes.”

The commission’s responsibilities were laid out in Walsh’s campaign platform, Syracuse Rising. To address beautification, according to the platform, Walsh’s administration will rely on municipal and volunteer resources to develop a new way to approach litter prevention and flower and tree plantings.

According to Walsh’s platform, the commission will also “build upon” Syracuse’s “underutilized” multi-agency service team model. That model will bring together several city departments — including the Syracuse Police Department, department of public works and code enforcement — to work on projects such as removing overgrowth, boarding up vacant houses and installing speed bumps/humps.

“To address ordinance enforcement, the commission will assist city departments in developing and tracking neighborhood-specific priorities and metrics, as well as solutions to chronic neighborhood problems,” according to Syracuse Rising.

As part of that initiative, the commission will include programs such as an “Adopt-A-City-Block,” “Adopt-A-Trashcan” and expand the Onondaga Earth Corps’ Clean Streets Crew program.

Walsh has also said that the Interstate 81 project could help improve walkability in Syracuse.

Throughout his campaign last fall, and in the months since the election, Walsh has continued to reaffirm his support for replacing aging parts of the I-81 “viaduct” with a “community grid.” Walsh said at his state of the city speech the grid highway replacement option would unify communities and would not negatively affect traffic.

“We must join together to create a consistently high quality of life in all our neighborhoods,” Walsh said at the time.

Published on February 12, 2018 at 8:42 pm

Contact Jordan: jmulle01@syr.edu | @jordanmuller18