OK.Maybe we should give the city of Staunton the benefit of the doubt. Lisa Hartley probably shouldn't have taken matters into her capable hands and made repairs to the sidewalk in front of her Peyton Street home. After all, if citizens start engaging in random acts of beautification, where will we be? People will lose their jobs; the natural order of the bureaucratic universe will be destroyed. Can't have that.
Hartley should have done what any average resident would have — groused to her fellow residents about the cracks in the pavement and the unsafe conditions; whined about the slow pace the city takes to make repairs; then complained about the shoddy workmanship after the city finally sent a crew (four guys watching one work, no doubt) to do the job.
But no;Hartley, a professional painter and handyperson, had the temerity to do the job herself after the city had failed to respond in a timely fashion about other problems in her area. Last week, she replaced some of the sidewalk in front of her home, painted it with sealer, and marked the street with a traffic line and a crosswalk so drivers would stop cutting the corner and taking out more sidewalk. VoÃla. And all at no cost to city taxpayers.
And for that, Hartley was charged with a felony and jailed. On the eve of the Fourth of July weekend, yet.
"We can't go around letting people paint their sidewalk," said Public Works Director Tom Sliwoski. "It's against city code."
What's next? Jailing little girls for scrawling hopscotch blocks in chalk?
OK. So Hartley should have done all the things we said she should have, plus allowed the city to waste more taxpayer dollars restoring the sidewalk to its unsafe, original low-rent splendor. After all, the job would have cost the city more than $2,000, since Sliwoski said it would require sandblasting, and since the city isn't capable of doing that, either, they would have had to contract the job out.
But no;Hartley, after being sprung from the pokey, went out on Saturday and did it herself. Withoutany sandblasting.
No more jokes; Staunton needs to do the right thing and expunge this charge from Hartley's record. Maybe they ought to consider offering her a job, too.
Opinions expressed in this feature represent the collective opinion of the newspaper's editorial board, consisting of: Gary Stout, president and publisher; David Fritz, executive editor; Cindy Corell, city editor; Jim McCloskey, editorial cartoonist; Dennis Neal, opinion page editor; and Macon Rich, production director.
Originally published July 7, 2005