Maria Estela Rodriguez and her husband painstakingly worked to make the brick bungalow they bought 10 years ago a source of pride for them and their Westwood neighborhood.
It has new windows, new paint, a wrought- iron fence and a new roof.
Now Rodriguez, who works on the cleaning staff at Denver Health Medical Center, wishes the city would do its part and pave the dirt alley behind her home. In the winter, it becomes a muddy, rut-filled hazard. Four years ago, a driver spun out of control in the dirt and plowed into a van parked in her driveway, shoving the van into her garage.
But as the area’s councilman, Paul Lopez, has learned, a solution is elusive.
The problem is that more than 300 of the alleys in Denver — including the one behind Rodriguez’s home — are private property even though they have become public by custom. Solid waste trucks drive through some of those alleys to pick up trash. In other instances, the alleys provide access to garages.
City engineers have pointed out that they can’t just pave private property.
Alley spat
Lopez did learn firsthand just how nasty the alleys can be: During a trip with a city engineer, Lopez’s car was jolted so hard by a rut he cracked his bumper.
“This just doesn’t look like the rest of Denver,” he said during a recent tour of Westwood laced with the private, unimproved alleys. The neighborhood is southeast of the intersection of South Federal Boulevard and West Alameda Avenue.
In 2004, Mayor John Hickenlooper decided he wanted to pave all 1,100 of the unpaved alleys in the city by 2015. But quickly, the mayor learned about the troublesome 300 private alleys, said Revekka Balancier, a spokeswoman for the city’s public-works department.
Still, the city has pushed forward and accelerated paving of the remaining unpaved public alleys, which represent about one-fifth of all the alleys in the city. So far the city has paved about 500 of those and plans to finish the rest by the end of next year, at a cost of $28,000 per alley. City workers schedule the work in conjunction with other nearby improvement projects to save money.
“We are working on a process right now to pave those private alleys,” Balancier said. “The hope is that we can add them to the end of the alley-paving program.”
She said the city hired a consultant to research each private alley and found about 30 had been deeded to the city but hadn’t found their way to the city computer-mapping system that determines which ones get improved.
She said the city attorney’s office is studying whether construction easements could allow the city to treat the remaining private ones as essentially public property.
For now those who live with them will have to suffer.
“I’ve been here for 56 years trying to get something done,” said Fern Veasman from the backyard of the Westwood home her late husband built. “I’d like to see something done before I die, and I’ll be 80 this year,” she said.
Complaints abound
Raymond Webber complained to the city about the dirt alley behind the house he bought three years ago. The solid-waste division pulled its trash bins out of the alley and stopped running garbage trucks through there to avoid any liability on the private property.
When Webber and his neighbor moved forward with their plans to block the entries into the alleys, other problems developed. City police said they couldn’t block the alley entries, which had become the way for city engineers to access the underground sewage system.
Webber said the property he bought out of foreclosure for $75,000 now is worth only $50,000, and he blames the dirt alley for dragging the value down. Somebody dumped a sofa, a hot water heater and a pillow in the alley behind his house, and now the city won’t pick it up unless he drags it to the front curb.
“This is the decade of the 2000s, why are we having to live like this?” he asks.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
