The Board of Revision of Assessments (BORA) held a public hearing on Friday, February 13, 2026, at 10:00 AM in Council Chambers at One Government Center. The sole agenda item was Resolution No. 532-25, declaring it necessary to provide for the rehabilitation of sidewalks and driveway approaches on various streets in the City of Toledo. The meeting included a presentation from Engineering Services, public testimony from property owners, and a unanimous vote to forward the resolution to City Council with a recommendation of approval.
Well, good morning everyone. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Council Chambers for this the Friday, the 13th, February 13th, 2026 meeting of the City of Toledo Board of Revision of Assessments scheduled for this time and place. And there is a quorum to conduct business. There's one item on today's agenda. We usually have a variety of items dealing with a variety of topics, but today is what I like to refer to the annual city sidewalk program board meeting. It is resolution number 5325 declaring it necessary to provide for the rehabilitation of sidewalks and driveway approaches on various streets in the City of Toledo. What we do is we will hear from the City's uh engineering services department uh on the program and uh if you pay attention, hopefully some of your questions will be answered by listening to them. Um we have a QA between the board and those representatives of the engineering services department. After that, uh we have names on a sign-up sheet. We'll call those names and you can approach the podium, introduce yourself, indicate the address of the property uh you're talking about, and let us hear your concerns or questions uh in that regard. At the conclusion of the meeting, the board traditionally uh makes a motion to uh forward the matter on to City Council with uh various recommendations. It could be a recommendation to not proceed, a recommendation to proceed without any changes or possibly some changes. It's been my experience in all my years chairing this board that most of the time property owners can speak with the engineering services folks and resolve questions and resolve matters at that level. Um so I want you to please be receptive of that being a uh solution. But again, you have an opportunity to be heard by this board, and uh you'll be given that opportunity uh today before the meeting is over. Are there any other preliminary matters, Mr. Martinez? Not at this time. Also joined up here, by the way, is Roberto Martinez from the finance department, and he is the city's assessment officer and acts as the administrator to this board. Uh anything further from the board at this time. Hearing none, I'll ask the uh representatives of the city's utility uh engineering services department uh to make a presentation to everyone present. Good morning. Good morning and good morning, everyone. Um I'm Christy Soncrant, the Commissioner of Engineering Services. And this year's 2026 sidewalk program is actually a continuation of the program that we did in 2023. Um the city actually took a couple years off of the sidewalk program to kind of try to revamp our program. Um in the past, it was complaint-driven, so residents would call in issues with sidewalks, and then we would go out, check them and get a contractor to do the work, but it was always piecemealed throughout the city. So we the contractor was jumping from one place to another, which of course is less efficient and costs more money. So we decided to go back, look how the city's sidewalk program works, and come up with a more streamlined and hopefully better solution for our residents and the city of Toledo. So how our program currently works now is we are going when we go down an area, we take a look at all the sidewalks on that street. So instead of just somebody said something about this corner, we'll do that one and not look at any of the others. We check all the sidewalks on that whole street, and if there are any that need to be fixed, we add that to the program. Another thing that we've done is we've looked at outside the box thinking and trying to save the trees instead of just cutting down a tree because the tree has raised the sidewalk. We ran a pilot program to try to determine different ways to fix sidewalks so we can keep our trees. So we have implemented some of those in this program also. This year our program also is about 3.5 million is what this year's program is. And 1.75 million is assessed to the property owners. 1.25 is for the removal of city-owned trees for the construction. Also planting of new trees. That will be funded by the tree assessment. So property owners do not have to worry about those. And then the city also has $500,000 worth of sidewalks that we are fixing for PED ramps or sidewalks that are adjacent to city-owned properties that are being replaced. So I guess in general that's an overview of our program. So there's three funding sources for the entire program. City CIP, assessed sidewalk, which is assessed back to the tax bill of the property owner. And then the tree assessment, which is a separate city assessment that everyone in the city uh pays into based on their front footage. Yes. And that takes care of the whole citywide canopy, which this program interacts with that tree program. Yes, it does. Interfering with the condition of the sidewalk.