Last updated: 21st June 2004

By DAVE MOORE of the Tribune’s staff

After the wheels of democracy spun to a rest last night, a romantic smile filled Christy Welliver’s face.

Members of the Columbia City Council agreed to widen all newly built sidewalks to at least 5 feet wide - room enough for one person to walk beside Welliver, who uses a motorized wheelchair. Welliver recently left the Pasta Factory with a former beau, and the wide downtown sidewalks allowed him to place his arms along her chair as they traveled, side by side. "You don’t know what it’s like to have someone holding onto your chair," she said. "It’s like holding hands," she said. She could foresee that experience for others as well along wider footpaths.

Earlier in the meeting, expressions of anger mixed with frustration, determination and trepidation during three hours of public input and discussion before the city council approved the city’s new street and sidewalk standards.

The standards will widen sidewalks and narrow most streets built in Columbia. The ordinance takes effect immediately, but developers can choose between using the old standards and the new standards over the next two months. Then, the new standards will be mandatory. The biggest change motorists will see is that newly built residential roads will be 4 feet narrower but still allow parking on both sides of the street. That means vehicles that are 6 feet wide will have less wiggle room when two cars approach from opposite directions.

Sixth Ward Councilman Brian Ash cast the sole dissenting vote, saying the issue of redesigning the city’s intersections should be included in the street standards and that he was uncertain about their cost.

Residential street standards drop to 28 feet from 32 feet in width, major collectors would be 32 to 44 feet, compared with the previous standard of 38 feet, and major arterials would be paved to a width of 60 or 68 feet, compared to 68 feet in the previous standard.

Items that Third Ward Councilman Bob Hutton and Fifth Ward Councilman John John found objectionable were pared from the bill. Mayor Darwin Hindman, the chief proponent for the new standards, horse-traded those elements but stuck to his guns when it came to narrower residential streets and 5-foot widths.

The new standards will change the face of Columbia’s outward growth. About 1,200 households are built in the city each year. Nearly three-fourths of all roads built in the city are side streets. While travel lanes on wider, busier streets would remain mostly the same width, their rights of way would widen in some cases to allow more room for wider sidewalks and for 8- to 10-foot pedways. Options allow for narrower traffic lanes if bicycle lanes are added.

City Manager Ray Beck and the public works staff cautioned the council against approving the new standards without knowing all the costs of wider rights of way and narrower streets and the durability and safety aspects of narrower streets.

"There’s a disagreement with respect to cost," Hindman said. "But we’re getting things we don’t" already get. "To me, we’re buying something we long ago should have been buying. ... If there is some extra cost, I’ll accept that."

By BLAINE W. DUNCAN

The residential streets of tomorrow are going to be narrower and lined with 5-foot sidewalks. That was the conclusion reached Monday night by the Columbia City Council, which voted 7-1 to change the city’s current street-design standards.

The proposed changes, drafted by the Street Standards Planning Group, have taken nearly two years to come to fruition. Discussion of the proposed changes lasted for more than three hours after Mayor Darwin Hindman reopened the issue for further debate. While many lauded the changes as a way of making sidewalks more accessible to wheelchair users, not everyone agreed that the overall scheme would be a boon in the community.

Planning and Zoning Commission chair Jerry Wade, who acted as facilitator during the planning group’s meetings, said much to dissuade council members that the proposed changes would result in higher construction costs. Citing a 2001 report produced by the National Association of Home Builders, as well as data from other cities that have implemented similar standards, Wade said he “could find nothing to support the theory that narrower roads would cost more.”

Area developers have said that while narrower roads would cost less to build, those savings would be offset by the need to build drainage inlets to accommodate an increase in storm-water flow. Don Stamper, a representative of the Central Missouri Development Council, directly refuted the idea that narrower residential streets would be less expensive. “These streets are not cheaper,” he said. “At best they are cost-neutral.”

Stamper said that while the planning group produced a “good level of work” in crafting the changes to the city’s street design standard — changes he said the Central Missouri Development Council supported — he wanted to make it clear that these changes ultimately could mean higher costs to homeowners.

The changes would be the first revision of the city’s street design standards since the 1960s.