Santa Rosa, Calif., faces hundreds of ADA violations, possible $3 million pricetag to fix them

From The Press-Democrat:

The city of Santa Rosa is facing hundreds of violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act and a potential bill of well over $3 million to correct them.

Two areas of most concern to the city are the possible need to make additional sidewalk curb cuts at street intersections and to rebuild the access ramp at City Hall.

The violations were identified by a team of federal inspectors who combed through city buildings including City Hall, the regional treatment plant on Llano Road and the Finley Community Center looking for failure to comply with the federal legislation adopted in 1992.

The list is contained in a document sent to the city by the U.S. Department of Justice within the past few weeks, said City Attorney Caroline Fowler.

She declined to specify the violations, saying they are subject to negotiations with the federal government and could be part of a lawsuit.

Since 2000, the federal government has reached settlements with 161 cities, counties and special districts across the nation to force compliance with the law’s goal to remove barriers that inhibit the ability of the disabled to access public services and buildings.

“It’s all based on access to public accommodations,” Fowler said of the law.

“It’s not that we have been singled out,” said Fowler, who said she does not know if the review comes from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has been doing some investigations on its own, or based on a complaint filed by a private party.

But she did say it comes “at the worst possible time for us.”

The potential cost to correct some of the problems, which early estimates now peg at more than $3 million, comes just after the city underwent a $26 million budget-balancing crisis and faces the potential loss of millions if state legislators dip into city treasuries to offset their own budget problems.

Fowler, however, did outline two of the issues raised in the complaint.

The most problematic is the act’s requirement for sidewalk curb cuts at street intersections.

The city has installed those cuts in all new streets built since 1992 but did not include them for most of the early 1990s on existing streets that were being repaved with a new layer of asphalt.

“We included them when we built new streets, but not when we did overlay projects. We do now,” she said.

How many curb cuts the city might have to go back to install has not yet been determined, but Fowler said, “I’m sure it involves hundreds.”

“From a monetary standpoint, that is probably the most expensive issue we face,” she said.

Another issue is the slope of the concrete ramp at City Hall, which the complaint contends is slightly greater than the law allows and could require the city to build a new ramp for wheelchair accessibility.

Fowler said a less expensive alternative might be to move where “people pay their parking tickets or bus passes” at City Hall to the ground floor.

“That would obviously be cheaper than ripping out all the concrete and regrading it,” she said. “Those are the kinds of things we are looking at.”