# Alaska and Hawaii Sidewalk Law: The Two States That Never Wrote a Sidewalk Statute

> Alaska and Hawaii have no state sidewalk-repair statute at all. Alaska runs everything through a generic capital-improvements assessment law; Hawaii's only sidewalk section is a planning list. What that means when a county or borough bills you.

Updated: 2026-09-05. Source: Who Pays the Repair? — https://whopaystherepair.com/guides/alaska-hawaii-sidewalk-law/ (claims cited to primary sources; see /methodology/).

Finish reading the other 41 states' statutes and these two feel like a missing page. Alaska and Hawaii are the only states in our database with no sidewalk-specific repair statute of any kind, no owner duty, no notice mechanism, no sidewalk lien section. That is not a research gap; it is how both states are built, and it changes where you look when a bill arrives.

## Alaska: one generic assessment law for everything

Alaska's municipal framework (Title 29) treats a sidewalk like any other public work. The enabling statute, AS 29.46.010(a), says a municipality "may assess against... private real property to be benefited by an improvement all or a portion of the cost of acquiring, installing, or constructing capital improvements." Sidewalks are never named; they are simply one kind of capital improvement a borough or home-rule city may choose to fund this way, by local ordinance.

When a municipality does levy one, the state-level guardrails are real. AS 29.46.080 sets the payment clocks: a lump-sum assessment cannot come due sooner than 60 days after the assessment statement is mailed, and owners may prepay within 30 days without interest or penalty. And the security is stronger than most states': "Assessments are liens on the property assessed and are prior and paramount to all liens except municipal tax liens." So the Alaska pattern is: whether you owe anything is a purely local question; how the collection works once you do is state law.

## Hawaii: a planning list, not a duty

Hawaii's highways chapter (HRS 264) contains exactly one sidewalk provision across its ten parts, and it allocates no costs to anyone. HRS 264-131 directs that "the department of transportation shall maintain a priority list of statewide sidewalk installation and pedestrian improvement projects" and that "each county's transportation department shall create and maintain a priority list of county sidewalk installation and pedestrian improvement projects." A ranking of future projects, nothing more.

The reason is structural: Hawaii has no municipal layer, just four counties, so the rules that mainland states write in city codes live in county ordinances and charters here. And the county layer is where the duty actually appears. State law is silent; the county code is not.

Here is that county text, verbatim. Honolulu's Revised Ordinances § 14-5.1 ("Cleaning of sidewalks") provides that "every property owner whose land abuts or adjoins a public street shall continually maintain, and keep clean, passable and free from weeds and noxious growths, the sidewalk and gutter area that abuts or adjoins the property owner's property." The ordinance carves out one humane exception: the duty "shall not apply where maintenance of an abutting sidewalk and gutter may be hazardous to the owner," or where the property has "no reasonable access" to the sidewalk. So in Honolulu the maintenance duty is written into the county code as the abutting owner's, expressly, while whether a given concrete repair falls to the owner or the city turns on cause, which our [Honolulu record](/rules/honolulu-hi-sidewalk-repair/) documents.

## What to do

- Alaska: the ordinance is everything. A sidewalk assessment must trace to your borough's or city's own improvement ordinance under the AS 29.46 framework. Ask for it, then check the state clocks: nothing due before 60 days, and a 30-day interest-free prepayment window.

- Hawaii: go straight to the county code. No state statute assigns sidewalk costs, so the operative text is your county's ordinance (Honolulu's is verified in our database; the other three counties each have their own).

- Both states: do not accept a "state law requires" claim at face value. In these two states specifically, it cannot be true for sidewalk repair. The authority is local, and asking for the actual ordinance section is the whole game.

Sources: [AS 29.46.010](https://law.justia.com/codes/alaska/title-29/chapter-46/section-29-46-010/) and [29.46.080](https://law.justia.com/codes/alaska/title-29/chapter-46/section-29-46-080/), and [HRS 264-131](https://law.justia.com/codes/hawaii/title-15/chapter-264/section-264-131/) with the full Chapter 264 table of contents (via Justia's code archive, disclosed per [our methodology](/methodology/); capitol.hawaii.gov refused non-browser requests). Hawaii's county-level rule is quoted verbatim above from [Honolulu ROH § 14-5.1](https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/honolulu/latest/honolulu/0-0-0-9675) (current codified text, American Legal Publishing) and documented in our [Honolulu record](/rules/honolulu-hi-sidewalk-repair/); the other counties' codes remain unverified and are flagged as such. City rules live in [the complete city guide](/guides/complete-city-guide/).