Santa Rosa must pay $2.5 million for disabled access

<p>If Santa Rosa's budget problems weren't bad enough, the city now expects to have to spend<NO1><NO> $2.5 million over the next five years to correct more than 100 violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.</p><p>A pending settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice comes after a team of federal investigators last year combed through city buildings including City Hall, the Llano Road sewage treatment plant and the Finley Community Center.</p><p>In addition, investigators visited parking lots and parks looking for violations of the 1992 groundbreaking legislation.</p><p>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</p><p>City Attorney Caroline Fowler said said the complaints lodged against Santa Rosa cover a range of areas.</p><p>The biggest and likely most expensive are the need to install curb cuts on street corners, curb ramps in parking lots and in some cases repave sloping parking lots to provide better sidewalk access to the disabled.</p><p>In some cases, it also involves moving sinks, fountains and toilets, sometimes only an inch or two to comply with the act's precise standards.</p><p>Fowler said among the violations Santa Rosa must correct are “a couple of toilets that were an inch off” — or 19 inches instead of the act's requirement they be 18 inches from a side wall.</p><p>“We have to move them,” Fowler said, noting “the (act's) regulations are very specific.”</p><p>Fowler said the 3-by-3-foot-square showers at the Finley Aquatic Center also are not within the act's measurement requirements, “although they are large enough to get in with a wheelchair and we've never received a complaint about them.”</p><p>Sinks and drinking fountains inaccessible to wheelchairs or those unable to lean over due to back problems, audible alarms lacking lights to warn the hard of hearing and park facilities difficult to reach without a disabled-friendly path also are among the problems the city must correct.</p><p>Fowler said all the violations must be corrected with five years.</p><p>The settlement, expected to be approved by the City Council on Nov. 17, requires the city within the next two years to survey the rest of its municipal facilities for any other ADA deficiencies and to develop a plan to deal with them once the current agreement expires.</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Mike McCoy at 521-5276 or mike.mccoy@pressdemocrat.com.</p>