In Pepper Pike, a Surprisingly Contentious Ballot Issue Awaits on Election Day: Whether to Build Sidewalks

To have sidewalks or to not have sidewalks? That is the question Pepper Pike residents will decide next week. Credit: Mark Oprea

Donna Rotman’s frustration with the roads of Pepper Pike may have come to a head in 2011.

Rotman, a retired school secretary who raised her family there in her home on Pinetree, had just gotten a puppy — a black lab named Watson — and was eager to walk the dog around the neighborhood. Because Pepper Pike has few, if any, sidewalks, Rotman was forced to either walk in the street or on the margin.

“I was walking, and didn’t see a hole in the ground,” Rotman, 75, told Scene at her doorstep. “My foot went in, and I broke my leg. I had to have a whole knee replacement.”

She added, “And I thought, if there would’ve been a sidewalk, none of that would’ve ever happened.”

For the first time since Pepper Pike was incorporated in 1970, its 6,743 residents will be voting on a process that would allow the city to build paths (read: sidewalks) along its major roads.

Or, if rejected, will keep the city as is, and maintain its “semi-rural” feel that defectors posit sidewalks would destroy.

As city planners across the country rethink downtowns in light of the pedestrian, rather than the car, the issue of walkability has extended to exurbs and suburbs somewhat new to the concept. There have been, not surprisingly, some clashes.

Last year, when new development tested longtime Hinckley residents’ view of their town as farmland, a Keep Hinckley Rural movement sprung up, rejecting the “high density,” as a manifesto put it, “found in urban and suburban areas.”

“The highest and best use of Hinckley Township is wide open spaces,” the screed read.

In legislation proposed earlier this year by Pepper Pike Councilman Pat LeMay, Issue 65 seems, at least on paper, like a clear cut deal to up the city’s neighborhood feel and safety. For $3.47 million of city’s cash reserve, as a mailer put it, Pepper Pike would construct five-foot-wide pathways on one side of Lander Road, South Woodland Road and Shaker Blvd. The sidewalks will even be dubbed “recreational trails,” as to remove residents’ responsibility for maintenance. At least “one portion” of the trail would be completed, the mailer stated, by the end of 2024.

Regardless of the apparent boon to dogwalkers, joggers and teenagers on their way to Orange High School, a political split has divided neighbors, with a sort of battle of preferences for safety versus aesthetics. Such sides, evinced in lawn signs that pockmark the city’s main roads—one with a red prohibition sign—have received funding by two political action committees: Pepper Pike for Walkability and Preserve Pepper Pike. (LeMay, along with four other councilpersons called for comment, didn’t respond.)

In September, following a trio of town halls at Orange High School, the city emailed a two-question survey to determine Issue 65’s resonance. Though the majority of respondents were pro-sidewalk, a large portion of the survey’s older respondents urged council to reconsider what they thought was a clear waste of city funds.

“Do not like spending city money for project which will benefit limited number of residents,” a couple in their seventies living on Belgrave wrote.

“The argument that people would walk along major roads, rather than take a car, is unrealistic and flawed,” a respondent living on Bolingbrook, who declined to give their age, wrote. “Some people want it both ways. Moving here for green, quiet, rural character but also wanting sidewalks. That is unrealistic. If they want sidewalks, select a city that has them.”

If the city does install sidewalks, will residents actually use them?

For a city composed primarily of $500,000 homes, and one where 76 percent of residents get around solely by automobile, according to U.S. Census data, it’s really a question of what is available at the moment. (A little less than 3 percent walk, bike or take transit for their daily commute currently.)

“Well, there really isn’t any place to bike or walk,” Meaghan Carreras, 38, told Scene at her doorstep on Pinetree.

Currently, joggers and schoolbound kids have to walk on grass or in the street, a huge safety risk. Credit: Mark Oprea

For Carreras, who’s been living with her husband Adam and their two kids in Pepper Pike since 2019, the sidewalk issue is principally centered on the safety of children—an obvious one. And an issue that precedes many what ifs: What if I could walk to the Heinen’s down the street? What if I could let my kids walk ten minutes to school, and not worry about them getting hit?

The problem of speeding is so bad on Pinetree and Lander that Carreras has requested a police cruiser to monitor those going over the 35 MPH limit. When a neighbor’s cat got run over by one of them, Carreras put a statue in its honor in her front yard.

Safe to say it’s why she only drives to the grocery store, not walks.

“I don’t. I certainly don’t,” she said. “I would love for my kids to get that to be their first job when they’re teenagers, and walk to work. But we don’t have sidewalks. Not happening.”

As for the holdouts, Carreras scoffed: “It’s not about safety or children,” she said. “They just don’t want change.”

Over on Lander and South Woodland, where “Vote Yes” signs slightly outweighed the other side, that was pretty much the case.

“I like the look of it, I like my grass—that’s it,” a man in his eighties told Scene from behind his glass front door. His tone was increasingly acerbic. “And don’t forget, someone has to pay for it. And that money has to come from somewhere. Us!”

Just like Carreras, Donna Rotman is surprised to see the walkability ballot go this far. She believes that there may be a veil of NIMBYism hiding under the fears of the holdouts.

At the very least, Rotman just wants a safe place she can walk Watson, who, 12 years old and with bad hips, is tough to get into the SUV.

“In the past, if we couldn’t get to a park, we’d walk around the block. And it was in the street, all the way for two miles,” she said. “I did that for years, but it would be nice if there was a sidewalk there.”

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