AURORA | Starting in December, city council meetings will be held exclusively online to accommodate construction in the chambers that will improve accessibility.
A $1.5 million project to make the chambers compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act received council approval at Monday’s study session. Construction is slated to begin next year and finish in August, but first the city will have to decommission the audio and visual technology used to record and livestream meetings.
The city awarded a contractor for the project in October and will need to transition to online meetings starting Dec. 7, per a staff timeline.
For online meetings, public participation will be available over the phone.
Due to limitations with public participation through the call-in line, the council agreed to suspend its recently adopted practice of prioritizing speakers 18 and younger.
Council members also discussed the possibility of hosting extra listening sessions outside of the online meetings to allow for further conversations and chances to engage, though nothing has yet been scheduled.
City Manager Jason Batchelor previously told council that the city doesn’t have a good back-up location to hold meetings in person because the space would need to be large enough to fit crowds and have audio and visual technology and capabilities.
“Fully virtual is fully accessible so we want to make sure we start with that as a baseline,” Batchelor said at a July 27 study session. “Recreating what we have in the chambers is not an option that we’ve been able to find.”
Earlier this year, the city identified a number of accessibility issues with the council chambers not meeting the standards defined by the ADA and, in July, brought forward a plan to make the needed adjustments.
The plan would add two ramps, expand the dais and add accessible seating to the audience area of the chamber. New seating will be installed throughout the chambers.
The new ramps would be installed from the top of the room to the assembly area, where the speaker podium is for public comment, and up to the dais, which will be expanded to ensure enough space for a wheelchair to fit behind the desk.
A January assessment of the council chambers determined that there currently aren’t accessible paths available to the dais or the assembly area. The chambers currently have a lift to take wheelchair users from the top of the chambers down to the assembly area, but the lift doesn’t meet ADA standards.