Gullixson: A heated debate over costly ADA Santa Rosa firehouse fix

Few stories have generated as much heat from readers this past week as that of the new Santa Rosa fire station kitchen, and other areas, having to be torn apart and rebuilt at a cost of some $183,000 in taxpayer dollars.

It's all because the new $4 million station on Newgate Court, which was years in the planning, was not built in compliance with federal law concerning access for disabled people.

A waste? Maybe, particularly if, as some contend, no one in a wheelchair will ever use the facility.

But our first question should be this: Who was responsible for this blunder? If the entire station needed to be built to Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, shouldn't that have been made clear at the outset? Instead, crews are now going to have to remodel a kitchen that's already the king of cooking areas. The work includes removal of a custom-made butcher-block-top island. All wall cabinets, a sink, dishwasher and counter top areas will be removed as well and rebuilt two inches lower.

It brings a new definition to the term mess hall.

But I'm not one to cast stones.

When I was 16, I was helping build a cabin for my family in a remote part of Targhee National Forest in Wyoming. The site was in an aspen grove just west of the Grand Tetons in a place known as Squirrel Meadow.

Under the guidance of a contractor, a cousin and I had spent a good part of a month building the cabin's exterior — walls of lodgepole pine. We had finished framing the downstairs when my father arrived to check on our progress and, eventually, to take me home. We were scrambling to get the second floor and roof done before breaking for winter.

After getting a tour and taking some measurements, my dad looked at the contractor and shook his head. 'This isn't going to work,' he said. The framing around all the doors including the front entrance had to be redone, he said.

As soon as he said it, I knew why. It wasn't an ADA requirement. It was a Roland requirement.

My uncle Roland had been a war hero. He had served in the U.S. Army and received the Silver Star for 'conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity' for saving part of his platoon from the 77th Infantry Division after they have been captured by Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific. But after the war he had succumbed to an enemy known as polio and was confined to a wheelchair. But that wheelchair didn't define or confine him. He loved to travel, and my father was making it clear that if we were going to build a family cabin it was going to be for all the family, including his brother.

So we ripped out the framing and started over.

As we did, I was mad at myself for not catching the error and for not thinking of my uncle even though we were 20 miles from the nearest town in an area accessible only by gravel and dirt roads. And I was angry at my father — for all of about five minutes. I've been proud of him for making that decision ever since.

Yes, the circumstances of these two cases are different. In Wyoming, we made the changes for someone we knew would be coming, and he did, driving a Lincoln Continental over those mountain roads no less.

That's not the case for the Fountaingrove station. It's possible that someone in a wheelchair may be stationed there, but it's not very probable. The law says that a public building built with public funds has to meet all ADA requirements. But do we as a nation really have the capacity, given limited tax dollars, to have laws that mandate accommodation for things that may happen instead of holding a standard of what will or is likely to happen? In other words, does it really make sense that everything in that station, including the captain's shower room, needs to be accessible? I don't know.

But I've asked Anthony Tusler and Lake Kowell, members of the local group DisQuake and authors of Saturday's Close to Home ('SR firehouse remodel is good news') to help me understand it. They will be coming in to meet with our Editorial Board. Until then, there's one thing on which we all should be able to agree: Whatever the standard, let's do it right the first time.