I do get that voting for Proposal P would be like voting for Brexit.
Although it is a well-crafted wish list and I do agree with many if
not all of the sentiments in it, things are probably not going to go
as intended once the Proposal passes.
For example, there is a wish list item of having the city repair
the sidewalks. Most often municipalities require homeowners
to pay to maintain the sidewalks in front of their homes.
That's if there even are sidewalks. Many communities
don't even have them.
On previous occasions, during the housing related recession,
before the bankruptcy, the city had been contacted about
sidewalk issues such as blocks lifted by tree roots. The
expectation and hope was for these blocks to be replaced
with comparable concrete blocks, or at least have the lifted
blocks leveled somehow.
The actuality was that if someone came to fix it, a patch of
asphalt was placed into the lifted section. The end result
was better than before, but not much. If anything, it
reduced the curb appeal of that area.
When the DTE contractors came through to replace the gas
lines to the houses a few years later they were quite generous
about replacing much of the aging sidewalk with new squares of
concrete.
However there probably was a vast amount of negative
feedback about the asphalt sidewalks they had put in before
that.
I can just see entire blocks of asphalt sidewalks being put in
as mandated by Proposal P.
But really this is a most excellent wish list item. It would be
nice to have city workers check every sidewalk twice a year
and maintain the sidewalks as people would like them to be
everywhere in the city. They will only probably need to fix
the severely lifted and badly crumbled ones for everyone to be
pleased at the result.
Kudos to the charter commissioners for thinking of it.
