Have you cleared the snow off the sidewalk where you live after Sunday’s winter storm? If not, you could be violating Bend city code.
“The importance is we always want to maintain a safe mechanism for pedestrians to travel,” Code Enforcement Division Manager James Goff said.
Goff says the city is not proactive when it comes to these types of violations, which are applicable to both businesses and residences. Instead, they are complaint driven.
“If your business has a complaint against it because you’re not maintaining your sidewalks, the first thing we’re going to do is go in there and first look at the premises history,” Goff said. “We’ll determine whether or not we have provided you with education in the past and, if it has been a few years, we’re going to educate you again.”
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Code enforcement says the city rarely issues citations for these violations. Goff says 2019 was the first year they had to issue these kinds of citations and have not had to since.
“We issued right around 10 of them,” Goff said. Predominantly, they were around Neff [Road]. There’s a safe route to school there. We had a lot of kids that were being forced to walk out into the street. So some of the businesses and property owners along that stretch did receive some citations.”
There is a deadline after significant snowfall for businesses and residences to clear their sidewalks. Businesses have six hours after sunrise to clear their sidewalks. Residences have 24 hours.
For more information about the city’s street plowing operations, you can find it here.
