VALPARAISO | Before the city could make any real progress on repairing its sidewalks, it had to fix its sidewalk repair program.

City Administrator Bill Oeding outlined the new program for the council Monday. The old program involved residents paying for the materials, and the city installing them. Oeding called that program unusable for taking care of whole blocks because some residents might not want to participate.

The only other options were to do the sidewalk work and charge the cost to the abutting property owners, require residents to take care of the walks and fine them if they didn't or just have the city pay for the whole program itself.

The first would involve going through the intricacies of the state's Barrett law, which Oeding said was impractical. Lawyer Ethan Lowe, from the city attorney's office, said the second might also run into difficulties with the Barrett law. The final alternative involves finding the money, which the city has managed to do for this year.

With $400,000 set aside from the city's share of the county economic development income tax and another $310,000 from a cumulative fund set aside for sidewalk work, the city hopes to get $710,000 worth of the worst sidewalks done this year.

The city's Public Works Department is completing a process of rating all the sidewalks to determine which are most in need of repair or replacement as well as what areas have missing links that need filled. A similar rating system has been used for the past several years to determine which streets to repave. The city will concentrate its sidewalk efforts south of the Canadian National Railroad tracks.

"We've still got a few challenges to get through, but there's still plenty of time to get the work done this year," Oeding said.

Although the city might not finish rating all the sidewalks, Mayor Jon Costas said, "There are some really bad sidewalks and some missing links that we want to get to this year even if they don't finish." Oeding urged residents to call the city to report if their sidewalks are in bad shape. With one exception, sidewalks will not be installed in areas that don't have them.

"We will be busy for years just replacing the sidewalks we have," Oeding said. "That $710,000 will do a whole bunch of sidewalks but not all we want. We will burn through that pretty quickly."

Some of the work will be done by city crews and larger projects will be done by Gariup Construction, which received the annual contract for concrete work. The work does not include $100,000 to be spent around Parkview Elementary School.

That money came from a federal Safe Routes to Schools grant. Oeding said the city still is waiting for the state to give the city approval to begin construction, and he hopes to do that this year too. A second Safe Routes grant is being sought for the Cook's Corners Elementary School area.