The URL can be used to link to this page

Home My WebLink About2/17/2026 Item Public Comment, Schmidt Richard Schmidt <slobuild@yahoo.com> Sent:Monday, January To:E-mail Council Website Subject:Public comment agenda correspondence Attachments:Council surplus fund ADA ramps pdf.pdf Dear Mayor and Council, Please see the attached letter about spending some of the current budget surplus on neighborhood ADA ramps at corners where there are no ramps. Thank you. Richard Schmidt 1 Dear Mayor and Council, I write to urge you to use a large hunk of the “surprise multimillion dollar surplus” of city funds — let’s say about $2 million — for building ADA curb ramps in the city’s neighborhoods, where they are most needed by those who need them to navigate the city’s pedestrian public right of way. (And where they are also supremely useful to others, like grandparents and parents with infant strollers and older residents with walkers and wheeled grocery carts.) I am writing to you early because such things are thoroughly worked out before the Council hearing where they’re adopted. I want you and staff to have time to make this happen. Whenever a member of the public requests such ramps we’re told there are no funds. Well, with this huge “surplus” on the table, that excuse ﬂies out the window. There are funds. And using them for this purpose is entirely consistent with adopted Council policy which states there are 3 acceptable uses for a surplus: CalPers payments, infrastructure like ADA ramps, and “emerging” health and safety needs. [Nowhere does the policy justify subsidizing SLORep. :-)] Here’s where things stand with regard to ADA ramps in SLO. By the city’s own admission, up to 22% of corners where ADA ramps have been required for the past 35 years still have no ramps. In raw numbers, that’s more than 520 corners. I am concerned the city has absolutely no plan for completing the city-wide curb ramp assignment given it by the ADA. Do you not also share that concern? Is this a reasonable situation? I don’t see how the city can argue it is. The ADA itself was enacted in 1990, 35 years ago. Before that the federal Rehabilitation Act (1973) also required ramps, as did corresponding contemporaneous California laws and regulations. So there’s a very long record of city failure to meet the mobility needs of the disabled and obey the laws intended to provide those needs. Today, when approached for remediation, the city digs in its heels and patronizingly responds it can do nothing to help. I can testify to this ﬁrst hand. My conversations with the city on this subject go back many years. I have, for example, documentary evidence of exchanges with Daryl Grigsby, former public works director, on precisely the issues I’ve laid out above. At the time of the Anholm bike putsch, I protested the removal of long-standing high-quality ADA pedestrian features, and the rotten design of many of the new ones, only to be dismissed by staff and ignored by the Council. Since then, as I have progressed from public advocate to one beneﬁting from these measures, I have continued to advocate: I advocated to the Council at its last goal-setting the need for making completion of the city’s ADA ramp obligations a goal and argued the importance of establishing policy for on-going annual allocations to complete the ADA ramp system citywide; that was ignored. I then urged the Council to allocate funds at the two-year budget-setting; that was ignored. I then decided to act personally, to do what the city says we can do, to make a personal request for speciﬁc ramp locations; that too was ignored by a city ADA coordinator 1 who couldn’t be bothered to respond to repeated emails. The current ADA coordinator was courteous, but gave me the usual answer — no ramps. Meanwhile, the city manipulatively and mendaciously tells the public it’s doing great stuff with building ADA ramps, when in fact it’s just continuing to violate civil rights law by ignoring its duty to extend the ramps city-wide and especially to neighborhoods. So, how can this be? Let’s look at facts. The city tells the public there are two ways new ADA ramps get built: 1, as part of the city’s rotational street rebuilding program, or 2, by direct request from the public. There’s actually a third way, by participating in goal-setting and budget-setting, which the city encourages the public to do. So let’s look at these three “ways” and see how in fact they work. First, the personal request route. I’ve already told you my experience. My explicit and speciﬁc requests were totally brushed aside. What was it I requested? I requested that ramps be built in my neighborhood and adjacent neighborhoods which I use for medically-prescribed disability- related exercise movement. I requested that missing ramps on North Broad (which should have been done as part of the Anholm bike project but weren’t) be installed; also on the Lincoln- West loop; and ﬁnally on the Broad to LaEntrada loop. I was told no way, no funds. Not even an effort to be made. Not even a line to be stood in. Just Nada. So the personal request route is a cruel joke our indifferent city tells the disabled. Second, the goal-setting/budget-setting route. Again, a cruel joke. I made a concerted effort to make headway via that route, and staff and Council completely dismissed my request. That leaves the third route — periodic street rebuilding — which is based entirely on policy and thus is staff-driven and in which the public has little if any say. This is where the city claims GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS with building ADA ramps. So let’s have a look at the reality of this route’s impact on completing a city-wide network of ADA corner ramps. The city brags that last year under this program it built 27 “new” ADA ramps. All of those were along Tank Farm from Broad to Orcutt, and along Sacramento Way. ADA coordinator is a city position required by the ADA to help the public get disability 1 accommodations. That person is supposed to be a problem solver, a helper, not a brush-off artist. In my working with the city’s ADA coordinators, I can report with honest frankness that the ﬁrst one I dealt with, Monica Irons, was wonderful; the last four have been useless and seemingly unaware of the functions of their position. That fact reﬂects poorly on city management and the Council’s oversight of the city’s legal responsibilities under the ADA. However, all but one were replacements for existing ADA ramps! And the one that was 2 genuinely “new” wasn’t at one of the 520 corners lacking a ramp, but was across Sacramento Way from the two corners of a T-intersection, justiﬁed apparently by construction of a school at that location. So we don’t have what the city would have us believe — 27 new places we can ﬁnd useful ADA ramps; AFTER SPENDING BASICALLY A MILLION $$$, WE HAVE ZERO CONTRIBUTION TO CORRECTING THE LACK OF RAMPS AT MORE THAN 500 PEDESTRIAN CORNERS THAT CONTINUE TO LACK RAMPS AFTER ALL THESE DECADES OF CITY INACTION. I am informed that as a continuation of last year’s street work the city is now constructing 11 more “new” ramps around the Nipomo Street parking garage. Although exact locations are unknown to me, I’ll wager given the downtown location every one of those is a replacement. At an additional expenditure of an estimated $375,000. So for the year’s ADA ramp construction costing about $1.3 million, not a single ramp has been built at a corner where there wasn’t one already. Can a city that operates this way really say, with a straight face, that it is “welcoming” and disability friendly? Or even that it cares? So I am asking, as I said at the beginning, that the city use a large hunk of its surprise “surplus” — say a couple of million $$ — for building ramps at neighborhood corners where there are none. Why neighborhoods? Neighborhoods are where people live, where their needs are most elemental. Neighborhoods are where people who would use and need corner ramps are most likely to be mobile. It’s where they can practice their “exercise is medicine” with city help rather than hindrance. This is important!!! Systematically excluding neighborhood residents from having pedestrian right of way mobility aids prescribed by both federal and state law is not just wrong, it’s plain mean on the city’s part. So Council, do your part. Allocate a large hunk of this surplus to satisfy this legal and human need. And then ﬁgure out how you’re going to realize the promise of the ADA in the pedestrian public right of way by extending corner ramps city-wide instead of just building and rebuilding ramps at the same corners again and again and again. Thank you. The rationale for replacements is that the previous ramps, though in all likelihood fully 2 functional, are non-conforming to current ADA design guidelines because those standards have changed since ramp construction. However, “non-conforming” doesn’t mean the ramp cannot be ﬁxed. Daryl Grigsby told me the majority of these ramps are non-conforming because they lack the bump-strips that tell blind people where sidewalk ends and street begins. Since those strips are add-on glue-down/screw-down features even on new ramps, there is little excuse for not making this simple ﬁx on existing ramps lacking them. Spending millions of $$ year after year replacing such ramps, while doing nothing to extend the ramp system into neighborhoods where there are no ramps, is bad policy, and the Council needs to exercise oversight to correct this. Otherwise, with an estimated 1,200 non-conforming ramps citywide, if you just keep rebuilding existing ramps, you’ll never get to completing the system no matter how much money you spend. Richard Schmidt PS. Costs. It boggles my mind that the city’s expenditure per ramp is about the cost of self- building a small house, a bit over $30K. This seems excessive. I don’t understand just why the high cost for our city: perhaps it’s over-design (I look at the deep foundations, quantity of concrete and steel and ponder these things aren’t supposed to last for millennia like ancient Roman ruins). Perhaps it’s that staff no longer design or build stuff, hiring consultants to do everything (and often end up with mediocre work that has to be redone, as happened with construction drawings for the Anholm bikeway). Perhaps it’s just the city is too cavalier with spending OPM so doesn’t seek value. Anyway, my only direct experience with costing this stuff comes from several years ago when I had to advocate for a relative’s ramps in the midwest, and we were talking less than a tenth the city’s costs! And then there’s CalTrans, which according to the publication cited below did a 2022 project with 104 ramps costing a total of what our city spends on 6 ramps — about $2,000 per ramp. Why the huge difference? I really think the city could get more for its money if it tried and changed a thing or two about how it goes about this. Efficiency can be more than a slogan. https://www.calbike.org/incomplete-streets-part-1-how-caltrans-shortchanges-pedestrians/? emci=544d3a9a-1d4a-ef11-86c3-6045bdd9e096&emdi=34964660-dd4a- ef11-86c3-6045bdd9e096&ceid=2152359 PPS. Here’s a list of the ramps I personally requested to provide me a continuous accessible route, fyi. The city refused to offer even a token response to this request, let alone try to ﬁgure out how to get the long-overdue job done. Along North Broad: • Mountain View, 3 ramps •Center, 1 ramp Along Lincoln/West loop east of Chorro: • Mountain View, 2 ramps • Center, 2 ramps • Montalban, 1 ramp • Venable, 2 ramps • Mission, 2 ramps • West Street cul de sac, 2 ramps Along Luneta: • Rafael, 4 ramps • Hermosa, 2 ramps • La Entrada, 4 ramps Along La Entrada: • Hermosa, 2 ramps • Catalina, 2 ramps • San Jose, 1 ramp • Del Sur, 2 ramps • Ramona (west side of La Entrada), 2 ramps