AURORA | City council is preparing to move to online-only meetings starting in December to accommodate construction in council chambers at the municipal building intended to improve accessibility.
On Monday, the council is scheduled to get an update on the $1.5 million project to make the chambers compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 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.
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 the July 27 study session. “We could look at doing it here with potentially folks in the lobby. There’s some options like that but 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.
In addition, there are too few wheelchair seating options, the wheelchair accessible spaces are not vertically distributed throughout the chambers and the accessible chairs do not conform to ADA standards. Some smaller issues include signage and switches being too high up on walls, staff desks not providing enough knee clearance and the chamber doors being too heavy.
Over the summer, the city collected feedback on the plan and received 27 survey responses. The responses showed 93% supported the proposed changes and 67% said the improvements increase the likelihood they attend meetings.
This is hilarious. The council chambers were already grandfathered as ADA-compliant and, barring a total renovation, could have continued ad infinitum with minor carpeting replacment, upholstery or whatever fixes were needed, as needed. But no, Juan Marcano and his corpulent, sometimes-wheelchair-using wife made it their mission to cost the city millions to accommodate her–and few others. Now, they’ll have to pitch their little fits to council not in-person, but at the other end of a Zoom call. Fantastically poetic justice.
Historically, I have been strongly opposed to this $1.5 million planned update with the Aurora budget in mind. Now I’m opposed only a little bit as the times have changed in our city.
When I read that our City planners were moved by the 27 respondents who were 93% themselves positive to the plan, I, myself am overwhelmed by the positive citizen support and, of course, needed to adjust my thinking.
Hey, Sentinel Blog, please keep we Aurora citizens up on the current news of what the Black activists think about this plan. That’s something, they might say that I’d pay attention to. On second thought, probably not.