Stairs Video Narration text

Voiceover to Stairs Video:
Here in the Oakland hills, near the busy village of Montclair, people walking make up much of the traffic. Commuters walk down the hill to the bus stop, and residents walk to the local shops for groceries and video rentals. Children from Thornhill Elementary walk to and from school.

For well over thirty years, there has been a functional stairway providing a safe and convenient means of walking from upper Abbott and Merriewood Drive down to Thornhill Drive. For elementary school students and commuters walking down to a bus stop on Thornhill, this stairway has been the alternative to dodging cars on our narrow, winding neighborhood streets. There are no sidewalks. The very existence of this stairway both allows and encourages hill residents to get out of their cars and walk.

These video clips were filmed to bring to your attention the state of these neighborhood stairs. The neglected stairs run along a public right of way between houses up and down the hill. The stairs shown here run from the corner of Thornhill and Merriewood Drives to Doncaster, through to Valley View, and continue all the way up the hill to upper Merriewood and Abbott.

The stairs are dangerous and unusable; barricaded, decaying and overgrown. What is left of the original hand railings is either unstable or missing completely, leaving exposed sharp and rusty nails.

Many steps are missing, having fallen down the hill from years of City neglect. Loose and decaying boards make up the remaining sections. Recently a neighborhood dog walking on the stairs knocked one of the boards loose and was chased down the hill by a 30 pound timber. Fortunately THAT time, it wasn't one of the neighborhood children.

Without asking the community or obtaining input from the local residents, the City has barricaded the stairs and erected ugly signs, warning the public to stay off of them. With no sidewalks in our neighborhoods, walkers are left with the option of navigating the dangerous closed stairways or dodging cars on the steep, narrow streets.

It is vital to this community that the hills stairways be repaired and maintained. There needs to be safe pedestrian access to the village of Montclair and between the winding streets. Most of all, we MUST have safe access for our school age children who attend Thornhill Elementary at the base of the hill.

Copies of this video cc:'d to City Attorney's office, Mayor Brown, City Manager's Office, Claudette Ford - Public Works, Montclarion Newspaper, KTVU Channel 2 and others.