NORTHAMPTON — When Northampton resident Chris Palames attends City Council meetings, sometimes he is forced to leave the building to find a bathroom.
“There is no accessible restroom when City Council meets,” said Palames, 72, who uses a wheelchair. “That’s pretty dramatic.”
City Council is “one of the real centers of democracy,” Palames added. “At a City Council meeting, I would like to have a pot to pee in … You can quote me on that.”
Addressing a lack of accessible restrooms in City Council chambers is one of the drafted recommendations from the city’s Disability Commission — of which Palames is the former chairman — regarding how to make Northampton more accessible. On Tuesday evening, the commission took public comment on the recommendations.
“We had about four complaints last night about people who can’t use their wheelchair on the sidewalks from Smith College to downtown Northampton,” Gene Page, the current chairman of the Disability Commission, said Wednesday. The problem, Page said, is the curbs aren’t appropriately cut.
Another topic that came up was how to make government meetings more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing.
Page said that commission member Rodney Kunath has been “trying for at least seven years to get closed captions for the hearing-impaired on City Hall meetings and School Committee meetings.”
The report aims to inform the mayor and City Council about ways the city can better comply with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the section that applies to state and local government. The commission worked with the city’s current and past ADA coordinators — Marie Westburg and Linda Desmond, respectively — to assess “whether and how effectively the anti-discrimination requirements of the ADA are integrated into the day-to-day operation of Northampton’s municipal programs, activities, services and facilities.”
Taking into account Tuesday’s public comment, Page said the commission plans to finalize the report and present it to City Council. “Hopefully, we can get something in by Christmas,” he said.
Drafted recommendations include creating ways to respond to complaints about deteriorated sidewalks; improving the accessibility of public parks; and making busy crosswalks more accessible with audible signals, improved markings and curb extensions.
The report also suggests enforcing snow removal rules to keep walkways clear in winter to prevent the sidewalk from becoming too narrow for those with wheelchairs or scooters to use.
And it looks at the multiple responsibilities of the current ADA coordinator — Westburg is also the director of senior services for the city. The job’s current structure, the drafted report reads, “is simply not workable.”
“Not only is the workload excessive,” reads the report, “but the coordinator’s role requires extensive knowledge of disability law and policy, federal and state accessibility standards, and the rapidly developing field of accessible information technology.”
To Palames, changing the ADA coordinator position is key to making progress on the commission’s proposed changes. It all hangs on that, he said: “Somebody has to be there who has the time to do the big job.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.