Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh is looking back at his two terms in office with pride and a sense of accomplishment.
Walsh said his administration largely succeeded in growing the city by sparking investment and developing housing, job training, and hiring programs aimed at historically marginalized populations. Walsh said they also improved large parts of the city’s transportation infrastructure. For example, in 2017, the year before he took office, he said the city paved only four miles of road.
“This administration over the course of 8 years will have paved over 100 miles of road,” Walsh said. “And sidewalks, under the previous system, property owners were responsible for maintaining and fixing their sidewalks. That wasn’t working. So we created a new municipal sidewalk program where everybody pays into it and we’ve been able to reconstruct 47 miles of sidewalks at this point.”
The city also doubled its fleet of trucks to plow those streets and hired a contractor to clear snow from many sidewalks. Residents were also asked to change decades of routine and buy-in to a new trash and recycling program using standardized bins…