Yelm city officials are taking steps to ensure all city intersections can be used by people with physical disabilities.
At their Sept. 26 meeting, Yelm City Council members unanimously adopted the Americans with Disabilities Act Transition Plan, which outlines how the city will make programs, services or activities physically accessible to everyone.
Following the approval of the ADA Transition Plan, the council approved a proposed professional services agreement with IDAX Data Solutions for a sidewalk and curb ramp survey to ensure ADA standards are met throughout the city.
The ADA Transition Plan will outline improvements for sidewalks, crosswalk push buttons and sidewalk ramps. According to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, public entities with 50 or more employees are required to perform a self-evaluation, or inventory, to determine possible barriers to accessibility.
Al King, with King Technologics, which advised the city for the project, said, in order to have an ADA Transition Plan in place, the city needs to meet several requirements, including naming Yelm City Administrator Todd Stancil the planned ADA coordinator. King noted all of the requirements were completed prior to the Yelm City Council meeting on Sept. 26.
The ADA Transition Plan entails an inventory of sidewalk ramps as well as methods to remove barriers, including fixing or replacing damaged ramps, scheduling and budgeting of upgrades using priority methodology and recording public engagement opportunities.
“Everyone, including the DOJ, understands that there’s no agency in the country that can go through and upgrade everything overnight. It’s not financially feasible,” King said. “Having a priority methodology allows you to do it in a reasonable manner to address those things that need addressing first.”
After the council unanimously approved adopting the ADA Transition Plan, Patrick Hughes, with Yelm Public Services, spoke about approving a professional services agreement with IDAX Data Solutions to survey sidewalks and curb ramps in the area. This survey would determine whether ramps within Yelm complied with ADA standards.
The council unanimously approved the services agreement, which is not to exceed $42,872.39.
According to Hughes, the first step of the survey is to inventory sidewalks, ADA ramps and push buttons throughout the city to determine whether they comply with ADA requirements.
Hughes said, to determine compliance, IDAX consultants use technology to measure ramp slopes and other calculations determined by ADA standards.
“It’s basically spraying thousands of points of light on their end, and using that information helps calculate the slope and the width of a particular ramp and do all of these calculations to determine if the ramp is in compliance all within a matter of seconds.”
He said, once approved, the survey will start right away.
Yelm City Councilor Joshua Crossman asked Hughes why the city couldn’t “save taxpayers’ money” and “use common sense” in deciding what needs to be fixed to meet ADA requirements, to which Hughes said there isn’t enough staff to do it manually.
“There’s a lot of measurements that need to be done. They’re outlined in the ADA transition plan that you just adopted. It would take a significant amount of staff time to do all that work,” Hughes said. “This can be done pretty rapidly, and we can get our plan (in place) much quicker.”
Hughes added if ramps are found to be out of compliance, staff would create a plan and budget to fix them. The ramps would be listed for reconstruction and completion based on priority.
