I’m going to start this story on a quiet tree-lined street in Mar Vista, where a couple I met with on Thursday — the day after the L.A. mayoral debate — have a problem.

It’s not an unusual matter, as things go in Los Angeles. On both sides of the street, the sidewalk rises and falls, uprooted and cracked by shallow roots because over many decades, the trees were not properly maintained.

John Coanda, 61, who grew up in Los Angeles, was never bothered by torn-up sidewalks as a kid.

“In fact,” he said when he first emailed me about his predicament, “my friends and I sometimes used the ramping pavement as jumps for our bicycles.”

But his wife, Barbara, was diagnosed in 2024 with ALS, and she uses a wheelchair. When John pushes her, they can’t use the sidewalk if they want to go to the store or meet with friends, or just enjoy a nice pass through the neighborhood without getting into a vehicle.

So John pushes Barbara’s wheelchair in the street, which creates an obvious safety problem. And despite John’s best efforts to get City Hall to fix the sidewalks, he’s not expecting help anytime soon.

I’ll circle back to this story, but first, about that debate.

I recruited a half-dozen L.A. residents to watch and send me their thoughts about how the candidates tackled the important issues. And then I felt guilty for having done so, because the candidates didn’t do much tackling at all.

They hit their talking points, for sure, and Mayor Karen Bass, Councilmember Nithya Raman and TV personality Spencer Pratt each had their moments. But by the end of the debate, and two straight nights of gubernatorial debates as well, I came away thinking there were no clear winners, but there was a definite loser.

Voters.

This is the fault of the format more than of the candidates themselves. The deck is stacked against meaningful, substantive discussions, especially when moderators ask — as they did several times — for one-word answers.

“Moderator questions are so meaningless … and they make it easy for candidates to take potshots at each other,” said longtime political sage Darry Sragow. “The format is guaranteed to elicit nothing that matters.”

It’d be better to have single-issue debates, and to have candidates pressed for details by journalists who cover those issues and can push back against unrealistic promises and expose a lack of depth.

My debate watchers did some of that themselves. CSUN librarian Yi Ding had praise and criticism for each candidate, but was looking for concrete plans and didn’t get many.

Ding was also disappointed that two other mayoral candidates — Ray Huang and Adam Miller — were not invited to the debate, and I agree with her. Both have been polling low, but with so many undecided voters, and such high unfavorability ratings for Bass, they should have been in the mix.

Mike Washington, a retired pharmacist and West Adams resident, said Bass has done better than previous mayors on homelessness and he didn’t think Raman or Pratt came off as worthy of bumping her out of City Hall.

“The public would have benefited from more questions related to the challenges young people are facing,” said Juan Solorio Jr., president of the San Fernando Valley Young Democrats club. His colleague David Ramirez agreed, saying he was hoping for “more discussion about the cost of living for young adults,” but he and Solorio are both backing Bass.

West L.A. software developer Mike Eveloff asked the million-dollar question in one of his many observations during the debate:

“Why is LA spending record amounts on homelessness, fire, police, and infrastructure while results deteriorate? Streets and sidewalks crumble. Even the city emblem right in front of City Hall is deteriorated. With the World Cup and Olympics approaching, voters need to know: Do these leaders have the financial discipline and operational competence to manage a fourteen billion dollar city?”

Venice resident Dennis Hathaway, author of “An Octogenarian’s Journal,” said he thinks “these kinds of debates are pretty non-edifying.” And, as someone I wrote about two years ago regarding busted sidewalks in his neighborhood, he shared this lament about Thursday’s debate:

“No mention of broken sidewalks, potholed streets, other deteriorated infrastructure. To me, that’s a much more important subject than non-citizens voting in city elections.”

(Bass did say during the debate that there was a new infrastucture plan in place, and that’s a step in the right direction. But there was no discussion, and when you read the details, 2028 Olympics projects will be prioritized, and it’ll take years to figure out how to fund thousands of additional much-needed fixes.)

The Coandas live not far from Hathaway, and their lives have been upended first by Barbara’s diagnosis and then by John getting laid off in February from his job as a data analyst. Barbara still teaches French via Zoom, and John is tending to her needs. They started a Gofundme campaign to help pay their bills.

With Barbara in a wheelchair, John contacted the city’s Safe Sidewalks L.A. program last fall, and I think it’s fair to say that name is somewhere between a misnomer and a bad joke.

The “program” responded by email on Halloween, appropriately enough, informing him that under the City Council-approved “Sidewalk Repair Program Prioritization and Scoring System,” his request for help merits only 15 points out of a possible 45.

“Currently,” he was informed, “the estimated wait time for completion of an Access Request with a score of 15 is in excess of 10 years.”

Happy Halloween.

Over the years, responsibility for sidewalk repairs has shifted between the city and homeowners. There’s a rebate program available to people who repair their own sidewalks, but it’s capped at an amount that doesn’t always cover the costs. And ruptured pavement is keeping lots of lawyers busy with trip-and-fall lawsuits that cost the city millions each year.

Barbara Durieux Coanda, who has ALS, and her husband, John Coanda, make their way down the ramp in front of their home in Mar Vista.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Coanda told me he doesn’t have the funds at the moment to pay for repairs, and even if he did, there are several more sidewalk disaster zones on both sides of his street, so he’d still have to push his wife’s wheelchair in the street even if he fixed the cracks in front of his own house.

Barbara graciously said she thinks the city has other, higher priorities, but in November her husband contacted the office of Councilmember Traci Park, saying he was told that he would have to wait 10 years for repairs.

“Sadly,” he wrote, “I don’t think my wife will live that long.”

A Park staffer wrote back, saying, “The turnaround time does sound realistic given the budgetary crisis the city finds itself in.” But, the staffer added, maybe the council member’s office could “help move the needle on this request.”

Coanda said he’s been too busy with his wife’s issues to follow up. But Pete Brown, Park’s communications director, told me Friday afternoon that the office is exploring ways to pay for fixes that don’t take 10 years, including the use of discretionary funds.

I don’t know how that might play out, but I do know that L.A. doesn’t need another debate like the last one.

We need a mayor and council members who refuse to accept that it takes 10 years to create safe passage for a wheelchair.

In the national capital of broken sidewalks, we need concrete plans.

steve.lopez@latimes.com