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The sidewalk on the northwest corner of Summerfield Hall does not make the task of walking up or down the hill to or from Jayhawk Blvd. an easy one. The sidewalk is full of potholes and is very cracked. According to Facility Operation director Mike Lang, “It [the sidewalk] has been pitted up for a couple of years, but this past year it has really began falling apart.” This problem affects numerous students and faculty members everyday. It is nearly impossible to use the sidewalk. According to Business student Anna Bliss, “the sidewalk is really hard to walk on. I have to really pay attention when I’m walking on it so I don’t fall. Sometimes I get so annoyed I just walk in the street.”

The Facility Operations department is in charge for all maintenance on campus and is headed by Mike Lang. He can be reached by phone at (785) 864-1115 or by e-mail at mflang@ku.edu. I left him a message on a Friday at 11:40 in the morning and had a phone call back from him within thirty minutes. He was incredibly helpful and agreed that the sidewalk needed to be repaved. He said he would have it fixed within the next three weeks. When I asked him how the sidewalk got so cut up, he said, “A lot of the deteriorating sidewalks on campus are that way from a combination of age and the use of ice melt products that we use on campus during snow events.”

When I returned to the site a week later to see if any progress had been made on repaving the sidewalk, the problem was still not fixed. However, Mike did send me an e-mail reassuring me that the sidewalk would be repaved.

Other Source:
Anna Bliss (913) 269-7175