City seeks ADA draft input

Katie Herron’s son was about 4 years old when the two started walking to the Bloomington Barnes & Noble and local grocery store from their house in Park Ridge.

Their walks are different than those most parents take with their children. Herron’s son, Ben, has used a wheelchair from a young age.

It wasn’t until these family outings, though, that Ben started to feel more limited by his disability. The sidewalks of Park Ridge are old and were built before curb cuts existed, which poses a challenge for him, Herron said.

“He would come to a point where he couldn’t go any further and we’d have to drive his wheelchair on the road, which wasn’t very safe for a 4-year-old,” Herron said.

The Americans with Disabilities Act Transition Plan has been implemented by Bloomington since 1990 to handle situations like Herron’s. Currently, the city is seeking public input on a draft of an update to its plan until Feb. 28, according to a government press release.

The draft can be found on the Bloomington government’s official website.

The ADA requires public agencies with more than 50 employees to maintain an up-to-date transition plan, which should survey accessibility barriers in programs and services and provide a plan to remove them.

Title II of the ADA prohibits state and local governments from discriminating against people based on their disability and from excluding people from programs, according to the release.

For this particular transition plan, the city is seeking funds from the federal level that will be put toward fixing sidewalks and curb ramps to meet ADA standards, said Craig Brenner, the Community and Family Resources special projects coordinator.

The emphasis for the update was from the Indiana division of the Federal Highway Administration. It found many communities statewide did not have up-to-date transition plans in place, said Vince Caristo, bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for the City of Bloomington Planning Department.

The city has also worked with the Council for Community Accessibility to create the strongest possible transition plan upgrade, Brenner said.

“The group acts as an informal advisory group to the city, so, anytime anybody has any questions or concerns, they can come to our meeting once a month and raise them,” Brenner said. “One of my jobs is to take the complaint to the department of the city that will respond to it.”

Two of the biggest achievements in the update have been the adoption of Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines and coordination between street re-pavement and upgrades of curb ramps adjacent to streets, Caristo said.

Because of the ADA’s transition plan, Herron said she has been able to call the City Street Department and know her complaint will be heard.

“They were out in about two weeks and fixed the whole area,” Herron said. “I was really impressed with the response. So then we had a clear walk from our house to both the grocery store and Barnes & Noble and wherever else we wanted to go. It was really, really important to my son in terms of being able to be mobile and be with the family.”

From Herron’s perspective, the transition plan and the council have been particularly important to her family, but the plan is just as important for improving the Bloomington community, Caristo said.

“The ADA is really a piece of civil rights legislation,” Caristo said. “It was important in our country and in our community by taking an important step towards creating a community that’s accessible to everyone and a community in which persons are not discriminated against.”