OGDEN — About a decade ago, Ogden began collecting data on where its sidewalks needed the most help.

“This was under Mayor Caldwell. We looked at a study of deficient sidewalk,” Ogden City Director of Public Services Justin Anderson said Wednesday. “Not necessarily dangerous sidewalks, but sidewalks that were cracked, had been raised by a tree … and then there’s sidewalks that are just missing.”

He said the first evaluation 10 years ago found the city was deficient on $23 million worth of sidewalk.

“We’ve tried to get a plan together because you can’t eat an elephant all at the same time — it’s super expensive,” he said.

Anderson said part of this prioritization of tackling the sidewalk elephant since that study has been to target fixes to sidewalks near higher traffic areas such as schools, churches, government buildings, libraries and parks.

He said that they have also tried to evaluate where the city is on addressing deficiencies in sidewalks on a more regular basis.

“Every four years, we cover the entire city and we’ll go out and evaluate all of the deficiencies,” he said. “We’ll go and you’ll see little yellow strips of paint on areas where maybe a tree has raised the sidewalk a little bit to bring awareness. That doesn’t mean we’re not doing anything with that — we list and identify these areas. … If it’s a higher-use area like schools, parks, churches, things like that, that gets a higher level. Then how bad the deficiency is.”

Anderson said with the nearly $750,000 the city receives in its budgets for maintenance of sidewalks each year, they try to target 10 areas per year to fix.

“We do a contract with the contractor and, instead of having them go all over and mobilize all over, we focus on 10 different areas so we can save on mobilization costs. Then the next year, we target 10 different areas.”

Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski said the city has also made several grant applications to further reduce the burden on taxpayers.

“In my administration, we’ve been able to leverage grants,” he said. “Sometimes grants have specifics that qualify — if it’s school specific or it connects with mass transit — we’ve been really competitive, especially with our grant writer. … That gives us additional investment into the sidewalks in addition to the $750,000 (from the) general fund. The 750 can then be used as match to leverage federal and state to make our proposals more competitive with the goal of being able to do more.”

Anderson said they also use some of these opportunities maintaining older sidewalks to bring them up to modern standards.

“Being an older city, we have a lot of areas that maybe are not up to date on ADA requirements,” he said.

Nadolski said one of his goals for next year is to free up more funds for infrastructure capital improvement plan, or CIP, projects, including sidewalks in the upcoming budget cycle.

“On the infrastructure side, they mostly need CIP,” he said. “I’m going to be looking for ways to reduce expenses in other areas so that I can increase investments in infrastructure.”