Notices for repair of unsafe sidewalks are going out around San Diego, but La Jolla will have to wait awhile.

The city’s Safe Sidewalks program, launched in November 2023, seeks to address growing concerns about pedestrian safety on aging and damaged walkways. It aims to expedite repairs by waiving certification fees and sending notices of responsibility to property owners to repair damaged sidewalks nearby.

Each notice also indicates responsibility for a permit including conditions to perform the work and a certification of completion. Some areas considered underserved are eligible for part of $300,000 in city funds.

Although most sidewalks are in the public right of way, responsibility to repair them lies with adjacent property owners, according to the California Streets and Highways Code.

San Diego’s policy says the city is responsible when the damage was caused by parkway trees, grade subsidence, city-performed utility cuts and heat expansion.

That leaves property owners responsible when the damage is caused by private trees and roots, deteriorating and cracking concrete, weather conditions and normal wear and tear.

A demonstration barricade is set up at a sidewalk trip hazard on Silverado Street in La Jolla in October 2022. (Ed Witt)

Currently, the city is issuing notices in Normal Heights, which is labeled eighth on the city’s Pedestrian Priority Model, or PPM.

No locations in La Jolla — ranked 27th on the list — have received notices as part of the program.

The PPM prioritizes communities where pedestrians are most likely to be. The presence of things such as transit stops, schools and civic facilities can raise a community’s ranking, as do population density and how many people walk to work in the area.

The downtown area, Old Town and Barrio Logan rank highest on the PPM, with less-dense areas such as San Pasqual and Pacific Highlands Ranch falling toward the bottom. Mission Valley and Balboa Park rank similar to La Jolla.

Repairs in review

The city said in September that since last fall, about 100 of the 1,400 property owners who had been notified that they could be liable for injuries caused by damaged sidewalks near their properties had agreed to make repairs. Those fixes typically cost a few thousand dollars.

Under the Safe Sidewalks program, property owners no longer have to pay a $2,200 city permit fee and can avoid a bureaucratic approval process by self-certifying their repairs with before-and-after photos they mail to the city.

“By eliminating fees and streamlining the process, we’re making it easier to repair damaged sidewalks in front of private properties,” Mayor Todd Gloria said in September.

City officials say they need property owners to step up to repair damaged sidewalks theyre responsible for, which pose a danger to pedestrians and cost millions of dollars a year in injury lawsuits.

The city also says it has stepped up in-house work, more than doubling the annual budget for sidewalk slicing repairs from $600,000 to $1.25 million in fiscal 2023 and sustaining that level since.

But officials estimate San Diego would need to spend $238 million over the next 10 years — over five times more than the city typically spends in that time — to fix a backlog of repairs that was estimated at 85,000 in 2015.

Though notices havent arrived in La Jolla yet, some action already has been taken to fix damaged sidewalks here since the new program started. The city led repairs at these locations:

• Sidewalk and pipe replacement at 7735 Prospect Place

• Tree-damage repair at 6645 Avenida Andorra

• Removal and replacement of 80 feet of sidewalk at 5611 Waverly Ave.

Whats ahead

The top seven communities on the PPM have been fully noticed over the past year, and the city is working its way down the list.

According to city spokesman Anthony Santacroce, San Diego has more than 5,000 notices to send to property owners, with limited staff to do so. The fee waiver for private sidewalk repairs ends in June 2026.

“Going forward, wed like to bolster funding and expand the number of repairs completed year over year,” Santacroce said in an email.

Enhance La Jolla and sidewalk repairs

In 2022, Enhance La Jolla President Ed Witt and a colleague walked through “every inch of every sidewalk in the La Jolla Maintenance Assessment District and identified 1,270 sidewalk trip hazards. He then delivered the collection of photographs and descriptions to the city in November that year.

Enhance La Jolla is a nonprofit tasked with administering the Maintenance Assessment District in The Village with authority to enhance city-provided services, including landscape maintenance, street and sidewalk cleaning, litter and graffiti abatement and additional trash collection. It also can privately fund and complete improvement projects in public spaces.

In the space of a year and a half in 2022-23, Enhance La Jolla was embroiled in three trip-and-fall lawsuits filed against the city involving local sidewalks. The city passed the suits to Enhance La Jolla’s insurance carrier, arguing that Enhance La Jolla should have identified and barricaded the hazards and notified the city.

Enhance La Jolla objected to being involved in any of the lawsuits, although the first case — filed in April 2022 — was settled for $40,000 and Enhance La Jolla’s insurance paid for it after the city passed it along.

A new contract with the city dated July 1 last year “takes away the liability of the MAD for trip-and-fall issues on sidewalks,” Witt said at the time. “We are no longer responsible for things we haven’t done. … If we did something to create a hazard, we would then be responsible.”

Witt praised the city last week for crafting a better contract but said he wishes officials “would want to help us shine The Jewel a little bit more” by addressing damage to La Jolla sidewalks, curbs, gutters and drainage.

“I give the city credit for coming up with [Safe Sidewalks], but I can tell you there’s a lot of sidewalks that are not safe and the city is taking it one bite at a time,” Witt said. “They’ve got budgets and money is short everywhere, but all I know is we still probably have 1,200 hazards that are just within our district. And that’s not acceptable to the public.”

Witt said the shift in responsibility to property owners necessitates the waivers in the Safe Sidewalks program.

“If you’re going to hold people responsible, you should at least make it easier for them to help themselves,” he said.

Brian Earley, manager of The Village MAD, said hes worried the program shifts too many responsibilities from the city to residents.

La Jolla residents have been encouraged to report sidewalk damage to the San Diego Transportation Department via the citys Get It Done app.

“It appears the Get It Done reporting service has absolved the city of being in front of these problems or being proactive,” Earley said. “They don’t have people looking for it now, they want to be told.”

For more information about the Safe Sidewalks program, visit sandiego.gov/street-div/services/roadways/sidewalk.

— La Jolla Light staff writer Ashley Mackin-Solomon and San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer David Garrick contributed to this report.