Residents of a Dundee street will have waited almost quarter of a century before repairs are carried out to their pavement.
Nesbitt Street residents have been campaigning for 18 years to get a pavement fixed and will have to wait another three years before any work is carried out.
Dundee City Council say there is limited money available for repairs to unadopted pavements and it will be 2020/21 before the work is done and householders can finally party like it’s 1999 – the year a petition was first collected calling for repairs to be carried out.
Residents claim the pavement is “worn down to the muck” and one 88-year-old woman claims she now requires a Zimmer frame after falling on the uneven surface more than 30 years ago.
The residents’ original plea was rejected because of budgeting reasons and they have been told it will be at least another three years before there will be money available to fix the problem.
To make matters worse for residents, they are having to watch as council workers fix the pavement on the opposite side of the road.
Margaret and Sandy Gibson, who have been living on Nesbitt Street for about 30 years have now gathered 18 signatures for a new petition – accounting for most of the houses on that side of the road.
They say the pavement is getting “worse and worse” due to road workers parking their vehicles on it.
Sandy said: “People will mostly walk on the road rather than the pavement because of the state it is in. That’s not very safe, especially when a lot of them are elderly.”
88-year-old Patricia Ellingford lives near the Gibsons. She fell over a protruding gas manhole cover on the pavement when she was 54.
The fall caused nerve damage and she now has to wear a brace on her left leg and needs a Zimmer frame to move around.
She said: “It’s so infuriating to see other pavement getting done when we’ve waited so long. Why couldn’t both sides be done at once?”
“I was an active person but the fall changed that. It was because of the condition of the road that I fell. It changed my life.
“I mostly take taxis now so I don’t have to deal with the pavement.”
The council confirmed the work has been included for the year 2020/21, “subject to funding remaining available” as part of its Unadopted Footway Programme.
A Dundee City Council spokeswoman said: “As the available yearly unadopted footway budget requires to be spread evenly across the city and the cost of carrying out the works to both north and south footways would have been disproportionately large, the works have been split.”
She added the north footway will be improved first as there are “marginally more properties” there.
SNP Maryfield councillor Lynne Short said: “It’s not that I’m unsympathetic, but if you bought a house next to a nightclub you would expect it to be noisy. They bought a house that had unadopted pavements and that’s not a mandatory service for the council.”
