STARKVILLE — Starkville is seeing the benefits of a renewed push for compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act, employing new technologies to identify where city sidewalks have fallen into disrepair.
Assistant City Planner Lyle MeCaskey presented an update to the city’s Americans with Disabilities Act Transition Plan to the board of aldermen at a Friday work session, including a variety of completed or planned advances in public infrastructure, online systems and experiments in new mapping technology.
“We consider this a living document. As we go into the future you’ll probably see this before the board annually to make updates on what has been or will be fixed,” MeCaskey said. “This has taken a year just because we went out identified all the sidewalks in town, basically assigning them as assets to track in the future. We want to make sure as we’re identifying those assets, we’re actually going in and creating documentation as to what is wrong.”
Starkville’s ADA transition plan hasn’t been updated since 2011. The current push started with efforts from the street, engineering and planning departments.
The physical changes have been a hybrid effort, both ensuring large projects like the Main Street redesign are compliant and having crews go out to do spot fixes in areas that aren’t likely to see a full resurfacing any time soon.
While that work may be most impactful to people on the sidewalk, the city has also been updating its online infrastructure and information-gathering capabilities. The documentation MeCaskey spoke about includes a public action log, where officials track detailed information about entries and their priority status.
The vast majority of those entries are new discoveries from 2024’s push, with only nine of the 90 items being holdovers from 2011. That list includes both streetscape improvements like ramps or parking space and items that aren’t so often included in accessibility discussions, like audio devices in City Hall’s courtroom. City Hall and Fire Station 1 are the two areas currently designated “priority 1.”
“That’s important partly because we want to be able to prove to people that we’re taking their concern seriously,” MeCaskey said. “We also want to ensure that when we go and address it we’re able to group together similar projects and do them more cost effectively.”
The city website now also pushes updates to its ADA page at cityofstarkville.org/ada, with maps showing where the city has scanned sidewalks and where it found issues. It also has official accommodation requests and grievance forms that can be sent to the city’s ADA coordinator Stein McMullen.
That process was assisted this year by an experimental lidar scanning program, using modern cell phones and software from the private firm Deepwalk. City Engineer Cody Burnett told The Dispatch on Monday that the pilot had let them get accurate results by just walking an intern with a modern phone down the sidewalk.
“It’s really cool,” he said. “It’s a really fine-tuned analysis software that lets us know where is best to spend our money. Otherwise we’d have to do this by hand with a level or survey equipment. You’re talking months and months of survey data that we can do in as long as it takes somebody to walk it.”
He said full ADA compliance is possible for a city of Starkville’s size, but it would take decades of work. Today, city workers are concentrating on the areas that see the most traffic and are in the worst condition, such as Main Street, Lampkin, the Cotton District, downtown sections of Montgomery Street, around the Chick-fil-A and a smattering of smaller spots around town.
“I think long-term you can get pretty close to compliance with a community of our size,” he said. “We’re not Houston. We’re not Atlanta. We’re actually geographically fairly small. So there’s an ability to get there one day. I think we all know that’s not in our lifetime. In terms of scale you’re talking years, dozens of years. But you’ve gotta start, right?”
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