FARMINGTON — There are roughly 48 miles of sidewalk in Farmington, serving about a third of the community by the committee's own count. Repairing all of it to the town's current standard would cost about $18 million.
Almost none of that is the town's to pay. Under the town ordinance, a sidewalk is repaired, shoveled and answered for by whoever owns the property it runs past.
The Ad Hoc Sidewalk Committee brought that finding to the Town Council on September 8, and then asked to stop working. The council voted unanimously to put it on pause until a town-wide survey comes back, with the committee reconvening in early 2027 to turn the survey results into recommendations.
The ordinance also gives the town the authority to inspect those sidewalks, order the repairs and bill the owner for them. Farmington has not run a routine inspection program in 25 years.
Town Manager Kathleen Blonski delivered the report. She sits on the committee herself, alongside council members Brian F.X. Connolly and Keith Vibert, Assistant Town Manager Kat Krajewski, Public Works Director Russ Arnold and Highway and Grounds Superintendent Jim Ruzbasan. The council seated them in January 2025 and gave them a list: read the ordinance, read what other towns do, count how much sidewalk Farmington has, tell people how the current rules work, and price out what a town-funded program would cost. They did all of that. What they have not done is answer the question underneath, which is whether residents want the town to take any of this on and are willing to pay for it.
The grades
The committee ran what it calls a preliminary condition analysis of the town's existing sidewalks and graded them A through F. Twenty-seven percent came back A, 36 percent B, 26 percent C. Eighty-nine percent of the network, in other words, sits in the top three grades.
The rest is where the concern is: 9 percent rated D and 2 percent rated F. The report did not convert that share into mileage, but 11 percent of 48 miles is a little over five miles of sidewalk in the two worst grades.
Neither the report nor the presentation says what separates a D from an F, or what the town's current standard requires, and the $18 million rests on both. It is the price of the whole network in today's dollars. Blonski was careful to call the estimate preliminary, and careful about why it mattered.
"That figure demonstrates the scale of the financial commitment that would be involved if the town were to assume a broader responsibility for sidewalk repair," she said.
Whose sidewalk is it
The ordinance is not ambiguous. Snow and ice come off the sidewalk within 24 hours of a storm ending, and if ice forms and will not come off, the owner puts down sand or salt. Cracks, uneven pavement and obstructions are the owner's to repair. The town manager or a designated official has the authority to inspect for hazards and to notify an owner that repairs are required.
If the owner does not do the work, the town may do it and charge them. Repeat violations may draw fines. Unpaid costs may become a lien on the property. And if somebody is hurt on that sidewalk, whether by ice or by a lifted slab, the owner is the one who answers for it.
The report also explains why almost none of that happens. Farmington has had no formal routine sidewalk inspection program for the past 25 years. The committee found that a comprehensive inspection and enforcement program was not feasible at the town's staffing levels, and that the cost a mandatory repair puts on a homeowner has been a real consideration in how sparingly the town uses the authority it has. Repairs have been required only in extreme cases. Liens over snow removal, the report said, are extremely rare; most people comply once someone points out the problem.
The committee's own summary, in its own words: the ordinance gives the town authority to mandate repairs at the homeowner's expense, and the town does not strictly enforce it.
Farmington is normal, and that is the finding
Farmington's ordinance is ordinary. Shifting repair costs from owners to the town would not be a correction. It would be a departure.
The committee compared Farmington against twelve other Connecticut municipalities: Avon, Bloomfield, Bristol, Canton, Ellington, Glastonbury, New Britain, Newington, Simsbury, Southington, West Hartford and Wethersfield. In every one of them, snow removal is the property owner's job. In every one but West Hartford, so is repair. Enforcement varies between citations, fines and liens, and the committee found that most of those towns do not actively run repair-enforcement programs either.
West Hartford is the exception the report names, and it names it carefully. The committee's table sources that one entry to the town's website rather than to its ordinance, and marks it "per website." One variation the committee did flag as worth a second look is that some municipalities offer income-based financial assistance to owners facing a repair bill.
What the town has actually paid for
The committee also went looking for every time Farmington has spent public money on a sidewalk that legally belonged to somebody else.
Over the past ten years, the town obtained grants for sidewalk repairs in Unionville Center and Farmington Center. Those grants covered roughly half the cost and the capital budget covered the rest. The Plainville Avenue sidewalk was repaired and improved on a project that was entirely grant funded. Beyond that there are a handful of cases where a road project changed the grade enough to require sidewalk work alongside it, and rarer ones where the Town Plan and Zoning Commission, in approving a development, attached a condition that made the sidewalk the town's to maintain.
The town's written criteria, accepted by the committee, explain the pattern. Public money goes into a private sidewalk when the project delivers a "substantial direct benefit," which the document defines as connecting multiple neighborhoods to a public school, a park or recreational facility, a trail system, or a town center. Outside grant funding is the fifth criterion and the only one a project has to meet. A sidewalk that connects one neighborhood to another and reaches no public destination does not qualify.
As Blonski put it: "The central policy question is not whether new sidewalks can be constructed, but when the public benefit is substantial enough to justify the use of municipal funds."
Meadow Road, and the one arriving for free
The Meadow Road sidewalk the council approved in July is the first new town-funded sidewalk in Farmington in about 25 years. It took two years to get there, through a public hearing in April, a deferred vote and a redesign, and a grant that covered part of the cost.
The council then heard, on the same night, that it is getting a second new sidewalk without paying for it. The state is rebuilding the culvert under Main Street near Tunxis Street, and as part of that work it will extend the Main Street sidewalk to the Birch Hill Apartments and add a crosswalk to the Highland Park Market plaza, at no cost to Farmington. The abutting owners will still carry the snow, the maintenance and the liability.
That job has a price the town does not pay in dollars. Main Street is Route 10, and the state expects to close it for about two weeks next summer to drop the new culvert in, rather than run a seven-to-eight-month project one lane at a time. No vote was taken September 8. Blonski asked only for consensus, and said she will return on October 13 to ask the council to set a public hearing for November 10.
Two new sidewalks in a quarter century, and both of them arrived because outside money did. That is the pattern the criteria describe, working as written.
What the pause is for
The committee's remaining charge is the part it cannot answer from documents: whether residents want the town to invest in existing sidewalks, whether they want a town-funded program for repairs or new construction, and whether they are willing to pay for it. That question belongs to the town-wide survey reaching mailboxes in early October.
The committee had the ordinance, the comparison against twelve other towns, the condition survey and the cost estimate, and it declined to recommend on the merits. The existing criteria, Blonski said, "have provided a useful framework, but the committee believes any decision to expand municipal responsibility or establish a broader town-funded sidewalk program should also reflect the priorities and willingness of the community as a whole."
That is a committee seated to answer a question deciding the answer is not its to give.
The motion to pause drew one comment, from Keith Vibert, a District 2 council member and one of the two council members on the committee.
"I thought the presentation covered it all," Vibert said. "I think the committee has some ideas of directions, but it makes sense to wait and hear from the community."
The council voted, unanimously, and moved on to a schedule of property tax refunds totaling $4,570.17.
The pause is not a wind-down; the committee's own report says so. It reconvenes in early 2027 with the research already done and, for the first time, some idea of what the town wants.
In the meantime the ordinance stands, which means the sidewalk in front of your house is yours: yours to shovel within a day of the last flake, yours to repair when it lifts, yours to answer for if somebody goes down on it. That has been true the whole time. What is new is that somebody has finally added it up. 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. The town has now graded forty-eight miles of concrete A through F without saying what an F is. Farmington Storage can tell you the humidity in your unit to the point. Somebody should be keeping records on the things you are not thinking about. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington long enough to know that the phrase "preliminary condition analysis" is doing a great deal of work in a report about five miles of broken concrete. He is on his second coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the committee that spent a year and a half answering a question nobody asked out loud, the ordinance you have been technically violating every February, the vote that decides whether the bill is yours or everyone's. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we mean it, because by the time you read this the report has been delivered, the vote has been taken, and somebody has checked the arithmetic. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰