The D.C. Council appears ready to back legislation creating a new executive branch agency that would oversee the city’s compliance with the 16-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act.
Advocates for the disabled say it’s about time. More than 22 percent of all District residents claim to have a disability, they say, and providing services is difficult when clients can’t get in the front door or use a bathroom without help.
“There’s been a real need for years to have a single entity within the government to help agencies understand how to make themselves accessible to people with disabilities,” said T.J. Sutcliffe, director of advocacy and public policy with the Arc of the District of Columbia, which advocates for the mentally retarded and their families.
The legislation was co-introduced earlier this month by five council members and co-sponsored by another five. It requires the mayor to establish an ADA compliance program, to prepare an ADA implementation and self-evaluation plan, and to create the “Office of Disability Rights.” The office would be an executive branch agency “to advance the civil rights of people with disabilities by coordinating the District’s ADA Compliance Program…” according to the measure.
The city “has not done well at all” coming into compliance with the Act, said Ward 4 Council Member Adrian Fenty, a co-introducer. A compliance agency is the “bare minimum” the city should be doing, he said, which will allow for “the sort of follow through that’s needed for an issue like this.”
Each government department is presumed to have an ADA compliance officer, but without oversight “there is no conscious institutional knowledge in place to coordinate compliance,” said Stephen Gorman, chair of the Mayor’s Committee on Persons with Disabilities. Gorman deemed the city’s success with ADA “erratic.”
Amber Harding, a staff attorney with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said city-funded homeless shelters are unabashedly noncompliant, from front doors to inaccessible second-floor bathrooms. In testimony before the council’s Human Services Committee in earlier this year, Family Services Administrator Ricardo Lyles said ADA compliance at shelters “continues to be a challenge for the shelter network which is primarily housed in District-owned buildings that are old.”
More information
» Mayor Williams issued executive ADA order in May
» Designated Office of Risk Management to organize citywide ADA compliance
» Required appointment of District-wide ADA Coordinator
» Set out responsibilities for other D.C. agencies, including property management
