Lawyers for Disabled Angelenos Say L.A. Is Breaching Its Sidewalk Deal

The city is in mediation over the nearly $1.4 billion Willits settlement, with almost 5,000 repair requests waiting.

When Los Angeles settled with disabled residents over its broken sidewalks, it pledged its best efforts to fix each requested barrier within 120 days. In June, the manager of the city's Sidewalk Repair Program told a City Council committee that even the highest-priority fixes take one to five years, LAist reported.

Ten years into that 30-year deal, the city is in mediation over it. The four lawyers who monitor the nearly $1.4 billion Willits settlement allege the city is breaching it. They've met with city officials almost every month since January, LAist reported Thursday. One of the four, Paula Pearlman, told LAist her side has two worries: the pile of unfinished repair requests, and the city's record on adding curb ramps when crews resurface a street.

Attorney Guy Wallace told LAist in an email that because of what he called the city's repeated breaches, people with mobility disabilities are still "denied full and equal access to sidewalks and other pedestrian walkways." Mayor Karen Bass's office said the city is still negotiating in good faith. The talks themselves are confidential.

The pile keeps growing. As of Oct. 21, nearly 5,000 requests were waiting, according to LAist's analysis of Bureau of Engineering data, and that count leaves out complaints filed through 311. The bureau says it has finished 1,750 repairs since the settlement took effect in 2016. A bureau spokesperson told LAist that more requests come in each year than the yearly budget can cover.

The settlement spells out that budget. The city must spend about $1.37 billion over 30 years on a schedule that rises every five years. The schedule sets $35.7 million a year for years six through 10 and $41.2 million for years 11 through 15. The latest city budget holds nearly $36 million for the program, according to LAist. Bass's office said the city has met the requirement every year she's been mayor, but it conceded that the money isn't enough to clear the backlog, so sidewalks improve very slowly.

The low- and medium-priority requests are worse off. Program manager Julia Sanchez de la Vega told council members those can take up to 10 years. The city is also spending $10 million to finish a laser scan of its sidewalks, which so far covers a third of L.A., including areas around 2028 Olympic venues. Officials hope the scan will help them decide what to fix first.

Curb ramps are a separate fight. The settlement requires the city to add or upgrade ramps whenever it resurfaces a street, and to pay for that outside the $1.37 billion fund. In February, Streetsblog Los Angeles reported that the head of StreetsLA had told a city commission the bureau could afford only 300 ramps that fiscal year, and that ramp costs had held full repaving to 60 lane miles.

The two sides have been at the table before. Streetsblog reported that Pearlman, speaking at a 2024 presentation, said the plaintiffs' lawyers had already sat down with the city in mediation by December 2023. When the deal was announced in 2015, City Attorney Mike Feuer called it an "ironclad long-term commitment" to repairing L.A.'s broken sidewalks. If mediation doesn't settle the disputes, the agreement lets the monitoring lawyers ask the federal court in Los Angeles to step in, LAist reported.

Twenty years remain on the deal. Cynde Soto is an advocate with Communities Actively Living Independent and Free, one of the groups that sued. She told Streetsblog in February that the city's progress meetings fall short: "They only show and they only talk about just a few miles of sidewalk."

Source: LAist, retrieved October 23, 2026. Other sources: corada.com, la.streetsblog.org, legalaidatwork.org.