Project Civic Access: Enforcement Initiative Under Title II of the ADA. Presenter: Mary Lou Mobley. >> TAJAUNA: Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to the Web cast, Project Civic Access: Enforcement Initiatives under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. My name is Tajauna Dunning and I'm with the Disability Law Resource Project at ILRU, your sponsor for today's event. I will be moderating today's Web cast and voicing your questions to the presenter. You can submit questions any time throughout this Web cast, however, I want to encourage you to submit questions you may already have at the beginning of this webcast. You can submit questions by clicking the submit question button at the bottom of your RealOne Player screen or simply address it to webcast@ilru.org. Questions will be posed to the presenter upon the presenter's request. I would like you to note that if you choose to wait until the presenter is closing before submitting your question, your question will then be sent via E-mail to the presenter. However, it is up to the presenter's discretion and available time as to whether or not an answer will be provided. Additionally, if anyone has any technical difficulties during this webcast, please call us at (713)520-0232 and dial 0 for the operator. This number is both voice and TTY capable. As previously mentioned, today's Web cast is Project Civic Access: Enforcement Initiative under Title II of the ADA. It is being presented by Mary Lou Mobley, Acting Deputy Chief of the Disability Rights Section Civil Rights Division for the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D. C. After graduating from Duke University in 1990, with a law degree and a masters in philosophy, Mary Lou clerked for the Honorable Philip M. Pro, federal district court judge. In 1992, she joined the Department of Justice. At the Department of Justice, she has handled a diverse case load enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as working on policy and regulatory issues. Currently, Ms. Mobley leads the Disability Rights Section Investigation Unit where she supervises a large team of attorneys and investigators and other professionals. And with that, Mary Lou I turn the webcast over to you. >> MARY LOU: It is my pleasure to be here talking to you about Project Civic Access or PCA as you'll hear me call it. It is an initiative that we started many years ago that continues to grow as we learn more effective ways of enforcing the ADA. The Project Civic Access is the department's premier way of enforcing Title II of the ADA with regard to state and local government. I want to also encourage you to ask a lot of questions. The more interactive the session is the happier everyone will be including myself because I know that I'm actually being responsive to your concerns. What I'd like to do is talk a little bit about the history of Project Civic Access and then walk you through one of our model settlement agreements to talk about all the different topics that we cover in there. And as I talk about each of the topics, I'm going to stop and ask you if anybody has questions on that topic. If you do, please let me know at that time or let Tajauna know and I'll try and address them at that time. I think this will work out much better than holding your questions to the end and I can gear my presentation towards your interests. We started Project Civic Access many years ago. It actually came about because we received a complaint against a relatively small city, and the complaint simply said my government has done nothing. We don't have -- they never did a self-evaluation, which is required under Title II of the ADA. Because they never did a self-evaluation, they never did a transition plan and things are just a mess. So please, Department of Justice, can you come down and not just require the city to do a self-evaluation and transition plan, but help them through it so they know -- so they get it right. And that's what we did in that particular investigation. That approach was so successful in that we went in and said, we're taking this on as an enforcement effort and we will investigate you and we will propose a settlement agreement and if you choose not to sign our proposal, then we will sue you, but we hope it doesn't get that far. What we think would be more helpful is if we work with you city managers, hand in hand, and figure out what you should be doing and bring you into compliance with the ADA that way. And that's really the spirit of Project Civic Access now is one of cooperation, but with the hammer of more formal enforcement activities, including litigation, if needed, to make sure that the jurisdiction that we're working with actually does comply with the ADA. So having said that, we started with small cities and towns in tourist destinations and university towns were the first two areas -- the first two types of cities and counties that we worked with. After the 2000 census data became available, we changed the focus to focus primarily on cities and counties with high percentages of people with disabilities relative to the other communities within a particular state. We also look at a variety of other factors when choosing communities we're going to work with. Those can include -- first of all, they can be complaint driven. We do get complaints and actually sometimes we get invitations from the elected officials in a particular community saying, please include us in Project Civic Access and we have done several of those. We do get traditional complaints under Title II of the ADA such as the one I mentioned that actually launched this whole initiative, saying my government really isn't doing what they need to do and needs some close attention from you. And we'll look at those things. Our first communities were very small communities and now we're working with huge communities. I think the city of Detroit was 1.3 million is the largest community that we've worked with to date. But now we don't really work with any of the smaller, smaller, smaller communities. All of the cities and counties we work with are substantial in size. So instead of doing 10 or 15 communities of 2000 people each, we're now doing lots communities of six and seven hundred thousand each every year. So that sort of how it's evolved in volume. Two years ago for the ADA anniversary in 2004, we had a goal of reaching 100 settlement agreements under Project Civic Access up to that date, and we did meet that goal. We had exactly 100 on July 26th, 2004. Last year, July 26th, 2005, we had even a more ambitious goal, and that was based on the census data, could we serve a million people or more with disabilities in that July 26th 2004 to July 26th 2005 time period. And I'm happy to say that through blood, sweat and tears, we actually were able to serve 1.3 million people with disabilities around the country by getting signed agreements representing to communities with that number of people with disabilities in those communities. So that was a huge goal and one I'm extremely proud that our staff was able to meet. It killed most of the process and unfortunately meant that we had to ignore a lot of individual complaints of discrimination that we received because, as I'm sure most of you know, our office is also responsible for handling the vast majority of ADA complaints that come in under titles II and title III of the ADA and those when we're completely overwhelmed with Project Civic Access, those unfortunately get put on the back burner and that's not a situation any of us are very comfortable with. There are a lot of very legitimate complaints out there that we need to be enforcing. So this year we don't have a specific goal for this anniversary, and we're refocusing on a better balance between project civic access and individual complaint investigations. I want to walk you through -- are there any questions to this point? >> TAJAUNA: No. We're good. >> MARY LOU: Okay, I want to walk you through one of our model settlement agreements, and all of our agreements under Project Civic Access and for that matter every other agreement that the Department of Justice enters into under the Americans with Disabilities Act is available from our website, which is www.ada.gov. We never agree to a settlement agreement that's kept confidential or private. All of our settlement agreements are public and that's always a requirement. Many times the entity with whom we're trying to enter into an agreement want to keep it confidential and we just don't do that. So you'll be able to find everything we do up there. The model settlement agreement that we have under Project Civic Access has evolved in a number of ways over the last couple of years. Pretty much every year we add additional topics to the model agreement and I can talk about some of those as we get to them. Each of the topics we work are assigning the language each year, because as we work with more advocates and more government entities around the country, we get more sophisticated about how stating the legal obligation -- how it can more clearly be stated so that it actually works in a real world situation. So we do Taylor the language a little bit year to year, but having said that once we have picked a community to work with, conducted our investigation and found, for instance, that their 9-1-1 system isn't accessible to people who use TTY's, we aren't going to negotiate the specific terms of the provision that is are in the agreement. That is everybody gets the same model language that is the approved model language for that year. The things that we will negotiate are time frames and I know I already have one question about why does the government allow a community to start as though it's 1990 and use its Project Civic Access agreement as a starting point instead of going back and punishing the community for not having done what they were supposed to when they were supposed to. Frankly, the answer is it's a matter of negotiation and it's a matter of figuring out what our priorities are. The way that project civic access has been so enormously successful in that, although litigation is always a possibility, we haven't yet had to sue anybody under Project Civic Access and we've gotten really tremendous compliance, is by working with them in a cooperative fashion. If we -- we do go in and tell them, look, you've got to take this seriously. We think that you have been violating the law for a very long time. If we then say -- and we're going to sue you because of it, then we shut down all communication and things get embroiled with their counsel's office rather than getting their facilities people on board and everybody else on board and getting them moving forward in the right direction. And, frankly, a lot of the detail that's in our Project Civic Access agreements we would be unlikely to get in a federal court order and we think that even though we may be giving them additional time, we're still getting a better result through this cooperative mechanism than we would be in litigation in almost every instance. So that should answer that question that came from the audience earlier about why do we sort of start from scratch. And I believe that was a question from Mr. Schotz. If I did not answer that adequately, please let me know and I will get back to you. Okay, working through the agreement itself, we start off with a background section, pretty much boilerplate saying all the things the ADA requires. Then there is the jurisdictions -- this is where I'm really sounding like a lawyer and probe putting all of you to sleep so I will try to stop that. Then we get into the meat of the agreement. And that starts with the section called remedial action and the first one under that is usually notification. Okay, so I actually sounded like an attorney there for more -- a couple more sentences. Under notification, we require the jurisdictions to adopt a notice saying they will not discriminate, et cetera, et cetera, to distribute it to agency heads, publish it in the local newspaper, do a variety of things and that way we also require that they have an ADA coordinator. I cannot tell you how many communities do not have ADA coordinators anymore or much more typically they have an ADA coordinator who is ADA coordinator in title only and has no time or resources to devote to what should be in most communities a full-time position of one or more people. When we do find ADA coordinators, they tend to be in the employment arena and not really have any control sense or connection with facilities management, Parks & Recreation, libraries, anything but hiring and firing of city or county personnel. Cities and counties tend to be much more focused on employment issues than anything else and that's usually where we find an ADA coordinator. The functions of an effective ADA coordinator include all of those other things as well. It needs to be somebody who has the time and the resources and they need to be high enough in a city or county's food chain to actually have the clout to make decisions and have those decisions implemented by other people. An effective ADA coordinator not only knows the personnel issues, but also knows the facilities used and the programmatic issues throughout the city in every department. We have found some cities and counties who have exemplary ADA coordinators and I can tell you from experience, those cities and counties have saved thousands of dollars in the long run by having an effective ADA coordinator rather than having to go back and handle everything after the fact when it's much more expensive, for instance, from a facilities standpoint to go back and retro fit something or from a programmatic standpoint to go back and figure out, okay, now that you have this after school program in an inaccessible building, are you going to move the whole program because you didn't think through the fact that you've got school kids who may want to participate who have disabilities or parents with disabilities who may want to be involved in the after school activities with their children. Those types of mistakes can be handled through proper planning and coordination and an ADA coordinator is key in every community. Many communities used to have strong ADA coordinators and as city and county budgets have gotten much smaller in the last four and five years, we've seen a lot of communities who have not fired their ADA coordinators, but piled on so many additional responsibilities that they can no longer effectively function as an ADA coordinator. So we really do have to make a strong pitch for a city and county not just to have a coordinator by title, but actually vest that person with the responsibility, funding and time to do the job well. And then it's in their best interests to do that. We also -- are there any questions about ADA coordinators? >> TAJAUNA: Not about ADA coordinators, but we do have questions that have come in in regards to the cities that are being investigated, so on and so forth. >> MARY LOU: Okay, do you want to -- >> TAJAUNA: Okay, the first one is how do you now choose cities to investigate? And along with that, the same person then sent in, do you expect to reach all cities/counties? If so, when? >> MARY LOU: Two great questions. The first one I touched on a little bit before. We now look at census data and look at the communities with a relatively high percentage of people with disabilities within that state. So if you were to look at a particular state, you would pull up on the census -- the census website has very detailed information, both in a map format where you can pull up -- you can pull up the state divided up by counties and see very quickly which of the counties have the highest percentage of people with disabilities. Or you can pull up the actual data, for instance, like if you were blind and you were evaluating the information, which the deputy chief Judy warden who I work with is blind, when she goes through the data, we go through the actual statistics and compare one county may have 19.3 percent people who are over the age of five and have a disability, and another community may have 27.8 percent for the same size county or the same size city. We're much more interested in working with that city that has 27.8 percent people with disabilities than we are one that has a much lower percentage of people with disabilities because, you know, dollar for dollar, our enforcement resources have to stretch and have to help as many people as possible. So that's our overwhelming criteria at this point unless we get a complaint that tells us there is a real problem in a particular city. Two years ago we -- I printed up T-shirts for our staff that said 100 down, 347,293 -- or whatever the number was -- cities and counties to go. And that was sort of in jest, but there are a whole lot of cities and counties. I used whatever figure the census gave for how many political jurisdictions there were in the country, and no, we can't get to every city. We are trying to spread our work around the country so that we have an even handed approach and we do have agreements with at least two jurisdictions in every state. We are trying to get to all of the big cities and we're prioritized to the extent that all other factors are equal, we are also looking at cities that have increasing populations rather than decreasing populations, again so we can help the most number of people. So I hope that's answered your question. >> TAJAUNA: Along those lines, another question that we have is, is marketing of the PCA program done to local governments so that they know this program is out there in the hopes that they make changes before getting snagged? >> MARY LOU: We have a lot of -- a lot of room for improvement in terms of marketing our initiative. You all, frankly, can help with that. If each of you took the Project Civic Access agreements from your state, and again, they are all available online at ADA.gov, and took them to your state and local government and said these are the things you should be doing and the justice department saying these are all required by the ADA then our work would be leveraged tremendously by your work and that would be very helpful. We are also exploring other ways of marketing our efforts because it doesn't help anybody beyond our -- the specific communities that we work with. It doesn't help anybody else unless other people know about it. So we are looking for different ways the get the word out. The Department of Justice is so traditionally an enforcement agency that it doesn't have a lot of good ways of marketing things in that sense. The things that we do have, we have an ADA newsletter. We have our website which is one of the most visited websites I believe in the federal government, certainly it's the most visited at the Department of Justice. And we try and speak to as many audiences as we can. >> TAJAUNA: The next one actually goes a little bit back to the investigation. And it says the Oklahoma Highway Department resurfaces roads with sidewalks and will not make the sidewalks accessible. How do I get my complaint investigated? >> MARY LOU: That type of complaint would come to us -- you could either send it to the Department of Transportation or you could send it to us. If you send it to us, it has to, by regulation, be sent to the Department of Transportation. Each of the -- not each of the federal agencies, but there is a core group of federal agencies that have authority to investigate ADA complaints under Title II, and all of those types of complaints have to go to the Department of Transportation. We can't investigate them unless the Department of Transportation has investigated, found a problem and sends it over to us for litigation. Under Project Civic Access, we're able to do things because we're approaching a city globally. We're able to rope in a lot of different areas that if we received individual complaints about a certain topic, it would have to go to another agency and we would be unable to handle it. >> TAJAUNA: And this is the last question, and again, it's on investigations and it says when investigating a target of complaints, who goes to investigate? What type of training do the investigators get? Do the investigators get the kind of training in architectural access, program access and effective communication to make them useful evaluators of the ready level of accessibility locally? >> MARY LOU: Yes, yes, yes, and yes. We have a cracker jack, but small, team of investigators that I supervise -- Judy Warden is actually the deputy. Right now I'm supervising them. We have about 30 people in our Investigations Unit, a number of them are attorneys. A number of them are trained investigators. We have two architects and we have other professionals. All of them get extensive training in just about every disability area that you could imagine. We have very detailed training on, for instance, how to measure a door width or how to measure the slope of a ramp. And we don't use any outside contractors or volunteers or anybody else whose quality of work we can't control on Project Civic Access. We do all of the work ourselves. We call this Project Civic Access, but in-house it's often known as project commodes America because we all go and we measure toilets across the country. That's the number one area where we spend our time when we're in the field. And I have myself measured, I'm sure, thousands of toilets and toilet rooms. It's not sexy, it's not really why I went to law school, but it's enormously important. Each of the investigators has a dedicated set of equipment for that investigator. Our blind investigators have talking tape measures. We have small levels which tell us in percentage and degree the slope of ramps. We have smaller smart levels that we can use when we're checking the cross slope of something that's too small to use with a two foot level. We all have extensive training and we're all learning from each other all the time. >> TAJAUNA: Okay, that's all the questions we have for now. >> MARY LOU: Okay. Going on to some of the more meat of the agreement. We have specific things on effective communication that come near the beginning of the agreement. There are general provisions, which are actually under the title general effective communication provisions, and those say that the city or county must identify sources of qualified sign language and oral interpreters, realtime transcription services, vendors that can put things into Braille, and implement and report to us their time frames for doing so and everything else. So we do address effective communication in a global manner here and I believe that was one of the questions we got before the teleconference started. The next topic that's covered in the -- were there any general questions about effective communication that have come in? >> TAJAUNA: No, let me make sure though because we do have one and I want to make sure this is or is not the one you're covering. It asks: Why don't most of the civic access settlements include effective communications provisions for people who are visually impaired, including information in accessible formats and accessible websites? Also why aren't they effectively monitored for compliance? I know that folks have had to sue cities like Detroit, for example, because the settlement just wasn't implemented. Ditto for Burton, Michigan, although there hasn't been a suit yet. >> MARY LOU: I was going to say I had absolutely not heard that Burton, Michigan has been sued. So that would surprise me, and I'm happy to work with whoever has information on that to find out where our compliance review may need to be beefed up there. We are working with Detroit and paralyzed veterans administration who sued Detroit. That wasn't on effective communication. That was specifically on curb cuts, and in fact, we have gone out -- one of our staff architects who many of you know went out with an attorney and the investigator from our staff who had handled the negotiations and did extensive training for the city of Detroit on what types of curb cuts are appropriate and which locations and we have additional training planned and we're actively trying to be a solution there instead of rubber stamping the city. Going back to effective communication provisions, all of our recent agreements have that same general effective communication language that I referred to. None of them are missing that language unless it was an older agreement before -- as I said -- our model has evolved over the years. I hear passionately about effective communication issues and spent many years working on some agreements with hospitals and patients and companions for deaf in Connecticut and really take great pains to make sure we are providing effective communication and that all the cities and counties that we're working with are as well. Two of the next subjects in our agreement -- one is 9-1-1 and the next is law enforcement cover two areas of emphasis ineffective communication that we work with all the time. The first, 9-1-1, we make sure that every call taking station in a 9-1-1 center in a community that we're working with has TTY or TTY computer equivalency at every call station, and we make sure that the call takers -- they know the technology is there and treat every single silent call as a potential TTY call. Those are things that are life saving and important and were often overlooked until we started really focusing cities and county's attention on that. We've had a tremendous amount of assistance with -- outside of the context of Project Civic Access by U.S. attorney's offices throughout the country who have also worked with their 9-1-1 call taking centers. Another area where I have to say it's probably the number one complaint we get in terms of volumes of complaints, and that is police activities where the police are working with somebody who is deaf or hard of hearing, and they don't provide effective communication in a variety of context. It could be that the person who is deaf or hard of hearing is a witness to a crime or is the accused or is a victim, and in many instances, the police simply don't know what to do. We have developed pretty extensive technical assistance guidance on that and every recent Project Civic Access agreement, meaning every single one in the last couple of years, has this same standard language in there that deals with sign language interpreters, TTY's at jails and anywhere else an arrested person gets the opportunity to make outgoing phone calls, it works with sign language interpreters and qualified oral interpreters, all sorts of stuff. We've actually out of this -- out of our Project Civic Access initiative we've developed some tri fold brochures that the officers can carry with them in their cars so that if they're patrolling or something like that and they end upcoming into contact with a deaf person in any of those context, they can pull out the brochure and figure out exactly what to do and on the brochure there is a place for their department to tell the officer exactly how, who to call in order to get a sign language interpreter dispatched to that location if that's what's necessary. So I think that all of our agreements, at least those in the last two years, do include strong effective communication provisions in them in those first generally and then specifically for 9-1-1 and police situations. >> TAJAUNA: Okay, and the same individual also asked, also why aren't state entities targeted? Not one state entity in Michigan, for example, has an ADA grievance procedure, transition plan or self-evaluation. I know because I've asked for these things and I've filed complaints. >> MARY LOU: Okay. We do -- we are working with one state and as is consistent with all the Department of Justice policy, I can't confirm which state it is that we have an active ongoing investigation until we have a public document such as a settlement agreement in place. So it's not true that we don't work with states. We also do have an agreement with Delaware, but it's for a particular series of their facilities and programs. It's not -- it's statewide, but only for -- I think it was the consumer and regulatory after first division. It may be because there are state laws and some federal laws that -- there are certain laws that require record retention for a certain number of years. Because the self-evaluations were supposed to have been done in material I '90's and the transition plan was to have been done at that time, there has been a lot of time that's passed since the early '90's and many communities that did to self-evaluations and then a transition plan no longer have copies of any of them. That doesn't necessarily mean they weren't ever done, but when we ask them, they can't provide them and we can't point to anything in the law that requires them to keep those on record forever and ever. Unfortunately, there is nothing in Title II or Section 504 really that requires them to update their transition plans or update their self-evaluation. So it's very difficult at this point in time because so much time has elapsed for us to identify communities that never did it as opposed to those that did it and may have even done a good job, but the information is lost through time and there has been no attempt by the community to redo it. Now, some communities that we've worked with have voluntarily gone through, like every three years or so, and updated their own transition plans and they've done new self-evaluations when they've had new agencies or they've restructured. They've done a good job of staying on top of that and all of that is something that I think is just good business and good government; but unfortunately, there is no requirement under Title II to update their transition plans. So there may not be anything available to send to you. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. This question actually goes back to talking about the ADA coordinators and it says for large communities, do you think it's best to have an ADA coordinator for employment issues, one perhaps placed in H. R. and a different one to deal with programmatic access issues given the special knowledge needed for each role? >> MARY LOU: Personally, yes, I do. There is nothing in the law that requires different people to take on that role, but the cities and counties that I've seen that have done by far the most effective job, have done exactly what the questioner is suggesting and that is have a variety of people with different skill sets and different networks within the city and county handle those responsibilities. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. Can you recommend a particular community that has done a particularly good job developing compliant policies and procedures? >> MARY LOU: Sure. We have some that we think have really done a very nice job. Let's see, from different parts -- some of you are in Texas or at least ILRU is in Texas and I know the city of Amarillo had a very nice program set up with an ADA coordinator and somebody who was very savvy about getting federal funding to make accessibility improvements. They did a very nice job. And of course any community, even one that has gold plated their ADA compliance, we're still going to come in and find additional issues that we think they need to improve. And Amarillo is no different when we still have a signed agreement with them, we still found things we thought they needed to work on, but they did a very nice job. Juneau, Alaska did a wonderful job talking about a different part of the country and showed a lot of creativity and a strong dedication to the ADA long before we showed up. They have some very specific regional challenges due to their weather and climate and geography. For instance, one of the big hobbies in Juneau is salmon fishing. One of the problems there is that most of the fishing platforms are -- have docks leading down to them or ramps leading down to them that have to accommodate a 35-foot tidal swell which makes it extremely difficult to figure out how keep a one in 12 slope on a ramp when you have that kind of change in tides. Where somebody may get on to the fishing platform at high tide when the fishing platform is close to level with where they parked and at low tide they stay out fishing for very long, it may be a very vertical ramp by the time they are ready to head home and that doesn't work very well. So what the city of Juneau did to address that, and this was their own creativity, long before we showed up, they reinforced the ramps going down to their fishing platforms and put their accessible parking actually out on the fishing platform. So everybody without a disability parked on dry land and people with disabilities who needed to could drive on to the fishing platform, park, transfer into their chair or whatever, and go ahead and fish alongside with all of their neighbors. It's that kind of creativity and sensitivity that we see throughout the country in Project Civic Access and it's been really one of the joys in working on this initiative. >> TAJAUNA: Okay, we have two last questions. One is a follow-up question and it says can you tell me does the DOJ take recommendations for cities to be involved in project civic action? My local town could sure use the guidance. >> MARY LOU: We do and we don't. We certainly take recommendations, but unfortunately at this point we have so many recommendations that we're having to be pretty picky about the ones that we take. We simply don't have the resources to do them all, although God knows I wish we did. We have already had approved the slate of communities that we're going to be working with over the next two years although they have not yet been notified. So their letters are in the mail. After that two-year period though, we certainly will be picking new communities and would really welcome input from the disability community on communities they think are ripe for our system. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. The last one and we'll let you get back to your presentation is regarding effective communication. It says the ADA information line interactive voice response system, and I'm guessing she's talking about at DOJ, it says many people with disabilities need get to an operator quickly without listening to unnecessary information. In the past, the ADA info line modified their system after I complained, but the system keeps on going back and does not inform people about how to get on the queue for a live person. I want to know what method of complaint there so I can correct the problem and keep it corrected when someone calls, they should be told to press 0 first and then go into the other information. >> MARY LOU: If you will separately send to me -- actually, you just told me enough. So I will make sure that that is changed to the extent that I'm able to do that. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. And we have some more that are -- some more questions, but they are going back to what you were talking about before. So do you want me to go ahead and ask the questions? >> MARY LOU: That's fine. >> TAJAUNA: One part of the settlement that Burton missed was having accessible voting systems in the 2004 election within the 90 days in the settlement. So I guess this is back to Burton, Michigan. In fact to this date, not one Michigan jurisdiction has any accessible voting device as the secretary of state here has not certified any. This constitutes violation of the ADA, 504 and now HAVA and has been brought to the attention of DOJ by myself. It goes to the overlap between noncompliance of the city and state entities as well. And then it has his name and he says he happens to be blind and who happens to live in a township adjacent to Burton. >> MARY LOU: Okay, one of the problems that we deal with working with cities and counties on voting issues is that as the caller or writer said, the state may not have certified any machines that are accessible. Voting is an incredibly heavily regulated area in every state, both pursuant to federal law and state laws, and many secretaries of state who are usually in charge of certifying particular machines and devices that can be used for voting have to do that before the city or county is allowed to select one of those machines. For instance, the secretary of state or whoever is in charge of elections for that state may say you can use any of these three machines. Our agreements have said -- and this was all pre-HAVA, the Help America Vote Act, the city or county that we were working with when purchasing new equipment or leasing new equipment had to pick the most accessible one that was available to them. Recognizing that they didn't have any ability to particular any that had not yet been certified by the state and if the state wasn't moving quickly enough, there wasn't a whole lot that a county or city could do and not violate a lot of laws. Having said that, now that the Help America Vote Act has gone into effect, we have started aggressively suing states who have not certified accessible voting machines. We have a lawsuit in New York. We have other lawsuits contemplated that aren't public yet because they haven't been filed, but we are actively working in this area very quickly and pretty comprehensively around the country. Once those -- and those suits are all fairly uniformly at the state level because, again, it's so controlled by each state as to which devices the cities and counties can use of the that's where we're focusing our efforts. Once the accessible equipment has been certified, then it's often up to the city or county to go ahead purchase those. Sometimes those are even supplied by the state and city and county provide the facility and the state actually operates the voting mechanism, but in any case, we are aggressively pursuing that although it's in the Help America Vote context more than in the Project Civic Access context. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. The next question, across the country we are seeing new curb cuts along the public right of way built incorrectly. States, counties and cities have gotten somewhat better at building one to 12 slopes, but they often ignore the flair side requirements of curb ramps. When sidewalks are narrow and there is no room for maneuvering space at the top of the ramp, we still find side flairs sloped in violation of ADAAG requirements. What is Project Civic Access doing to require that incorrectly built curb ramps to be fixed in a timely manner? >> MARY LOU: Well, first of all, our biggest challenge in Project Civic Access is even getting cities and counties to put in the curb ramps. I'm glad that the caller is at the level of sophistication that it's a question of how those curb ramps are being built because we're still seeing communities that won't put them in until we come along and that's very distressing. It is, of course, also very distressing when they've gone to the expense and effort of doing what they should have been doing all along, that is putting in curb cuts, but putting them in in a way that's unusable. Very frustrating for everybody involved and I don't have an easy solution to that. The most glaring example of this, again, is in Detroit where we signed a settlement agreement with them. All of our agreements include monitoring and reporting requirements. Detroit's agreement required that they complete their curb cuts by I believe it's next January, January 2007, and at that point we would then go out and inspect them. PVA, because it's on the ground there, saw that the curb cuts the city was putting in pursuant to our agreement were not accessible. In fact, went on and sued them and we're now working with the city of Detroit to go back and they're going to have to fix all those curb ramps that they did incorrectly. I think there has been a lot of attention to the Detroit curb cut lawsuit and I think it's appropriate attention and I think the more cities and counties pay attention to that, they will then focus on what it means to make a curb cut that actually works for somebody because it's not enough to just put in something that looks right to an able bodied person if it doesn't actually work for people with disabilities. >> TAJAUNA: Okay, this last question is actually on libraries. It says years ago there used to be a bookmobile in town. When the town discontinued it, I remember the newspaper said no one could go without books because the bookmobile no longer ran. I am without books unless I pay someone to pick them up and drop them off. It seems each community decides how to handle books and tapes and shut-ins. I love my library and the people there, but I wonder if there is a nodding acquaintance with a violation of the law here. What constitutes an accessible library, reasonable accommodation to get into the building or reasonable accommodation to get to the media to the person? Anything? >> MARY LOU: Yeah, this is a very sophisticated question and it's a very appropriate question. Many of the ADA technical assistance materials talk in terms of removing barriers to facilities so people with disabilities can enter. There are, of course, many people with disabilities who can't -- for whom architectural access is not the issue, but in fact program access more broadly construed is the issue and this is the perfect example of that. That is, you can remove all the barriers to the library, but if somebody can't get to the library due to their disability, they should still be able to access the services that the library has to offer and that would include, of course, being able to check out and read books. That's a complaint that I think I can address one on one if that person would like to file a complaint with us, or pursue it perhaps with the Department of Education who handles many libraries issues as well. >> TAJAUNA: That's it for now. >> MARY LOU: Let me keep moving on. I'm going to skim over employment because it's something that we actually do see most cities and counties at least having a basic understanding of the ADA's employment provisions. It's getting more challenging in some areas, a lot of communities especially in the southwest are requiring drivers licenses for all job applicants. They are doing that not thinking about the disability implication, but they're doing that to screen out undocumented workers and it's becoming something that ends up screening out a whole lot of people with disabilities as well. So we do see those types of employment issues, but at this point, with the size of cities and counties that we're working with, it's rare for a city or a county of 100,000 or more to not understand the basic ADA employment issues. So I really don't want to spend too much time on that here. The next topic that we get to is voting, and our agreements that are online are all pre-Help America Vote Act. The only agreement that we've signed since January was with the Arlington County, Virginia and that was on March 30th, two weeks ago. And Arlington County actually has a separate district that handles its elections. So voting wasn't an issue for that, and we are going to be harmonizing the ADA and HAVA language and subsuming HAVA, at least the polling place accessibility issues for HAVA and probably the voting equipment issues as well in our future Project Civic Access agreements, but you won't see the Help America Vote Act in any of the current agreements because it wasn't in effect when any of them were signed. So moving right along -- you'll be glad to know that even before the Help America Vote Act, we did include under our voting provisions we looked at removing barriers to the polling places. We looked at providing effective communication. We looked at alternatives for people who could not get to the polls, such as same day absentee balloting. We looked at voter registration materials being available in a huge variety of alternate formats. We looked at purchasing accessible voting machines, et cetera, et cetera. So those are some of the -- that's the breath of topics we dealt with under that and that was all before the ADA was informed by HAVA. The next topic that we deal with is one that is -- on the news every night these days and that is emergency management procedures and policies. For years now, and this is not just post Katrina, but for years we have looked at some really key issues that we think all communities across the country need to be looking at in terms of making sure that their emergency management procedures and policies include aspects for disability-related planning. The first provision in this section talks about if the city or county delegates things to the Red Cross or another party, it needs to make sure that that other party is actually complying with the ADA because as I'm sure all of you know, a city or county can't discriminate -- it can't allow its contractors to discriminate or do anything that it would not itself be able to do. So if the American Red Cross is actually involved in shelter selection and the Red Cross is picking out shelters that are not accessible, or if the Red Cross or any other sheltering entity is banning people who have legitimate service animals from its shelters or doing anything else that would violate the law if the city or county did it, the city or county is still on the hook if they are the ones who have delegated their responsibility out to the Red Cross or some other group. So that's the very first part and it's very important because oftentimes those delegations are done in a way that sort of a wholesale delegation of responsibility without any follow up and without any real understanding of how this will be carried out. Some of the other issues that we've dealt with, we look at community evacuation plans to make sure the people who have mobility impairments, vision impairments, hearing impairments, cognitive disabilities, mental illness and other disabilities are able to self-evacuate or be evacuated by others. In some communities in some parts of the country they are instituting registries of people who want additional assistance when evacuating. This is very common in Florida. We've seen some communities do it well. Others who do it poorly. Obviously any time somebody is collecting disability-related information, you want to have a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that it's not misused or mishandled or made public; but it can be very helpful to have appropriately confidential registrations in place so that somebody in the middle of an emergency actually does get assistance that they need. We ask them to look at accessible transportation needs. One community whose emergency plan I just reviewed actually has preexisting agreements with not only school districts, but many lift equipped vehicles but also its paratransit program and an airport shuttle service, a private shuttle service that has lift vehicles and has preexisting agreements with them so in the event that need to evacuate their community, they have lift equipped vehicles on hand and the drivers are hand to know how to operate the lifts to help with moving people who have mobility impairments out of the area and to safety. We make sure that their emergency warning systems that use sirens or other audible also provide ways to inform people who are deaf or have hearing impairments of impending disasters. A lot of communities in this day an age instead of just using community sirens, which here in D. C. for instance, the pealing of church bells is the primary way that we in D. C. are supposed to be told that there is something going on and we may need to evacuate or get to a safe place. Somebody who is deaf isn't going to be able to hear that, but many governments have started setting up registries where you can get a page or an E-mail or a text message immediately saying that there is an emergency and what to do with further instructions. Those are great not just for people with disabilities, frankly, I'm not deaf or hard of hearing. If I heard a bunch of church bells going off I wouldn't know whether it was a wedding procession or time to head for the basement or the penthouse. So having more information on an E-mail is helpful for everyone and I have subscribed to several of those procedures. Our office is about two blocks from the White House and on days like 9/11 it gets a little strange around here. So those types of visual cues are very helpful in the event of an emergency. We also look at lower tech options such as having the city or county dispatch qualified sign language interpreters to T. V. broadcasting stations so they can assist with getting information out in a visual format. We have the cities and counties identify their emergency shelters and make sure that they have adequate shelters that are not only physically accessible, including the parking the, the route to the entrance, the entrance, the shelter area itself which may be something like a high school gym as opposed to the cafeteria, but also the toileting and showering areas that are serving the shelter community and that those are all accessible to people with disabilities. We make sure that they have adequate shelters with backup generators. Generators are -- I was surprised to find out that most shelters don't have emergency generators. Some do. Well, if I used a power chair or anything else that required electricity and I was going to be there for any length of time, I would want to make sure that the shelter I was going to had some backup mode of electricity so that I would be able to make use of that if I needed to. Those are some of the sort of basic things that we look at. We also look to make sure that they have a way to keep medications refrigerated. A lot of people use insulin and other temperature sensitive medications, and the shelter selection should include looking to see whether they have a way of keeping those types of medications cool. Let's see, we look at their policies to make sure that people who use service animals are not separated from their service animals during a sheltering processor during an evacuation. And this is an issue that comes up with every emergency in every sheltering opportunity we hear of problems around the country where people are told you can't bring that dog in here. You can't bring -- you can't bring your pet. And you don't want to be standing at the door trying to get into a shelter because a tornado is bearing down on you and hearing, again, for the millionth time in your life that your dog isn't a service animal, it's just a pet and needs to stay outside. That's inappropriate and it is something that we address in these agreements. We also look at specific shelters within communities, although oftentimes we don't look at every shelter. We may prioritize shelters that are owned by the governmental entity in question and as you know many shelters are not. Some shelters are churches or synagogues or mosques that are otherwise exempt from most of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 504 of The Rehabilitation Act and have absolutely no legal obligation to be accessible. And that's another issue that oftentimes when a city or county delegates their responsibilities to the Red Cross for shelter selection, this may not be thinking in those terms of, wow, these things aren't covered by federal law or aren't covered by the ADA so they are not accessible. Oftentimes the assumption is made that all public type buildings are accessible and nobody goes and look at them with that view. We look at -- we also have each community set up opportunities for post emergency temporary housing that have to be accessible for people with disabilities. Most communities have some plan in place to house people for something longer than a shelter period would typically be. A shelter might -- and something other than a broad scale disaster like Katrina, oftentimes shelters are there for two or three days and if your home has been destroyed or there is something else going on and you need longer term housing, they have a separate program to deal with that and they go ahead and close the shelter and move you into another program. If you have mobility elements -- mobility assistance elements to your typical residence, for instance, you have a ramp that was destroyed in an earthquake, you may need that housing for much longer period than somebody without a disability who can go back to their home as soon as it's been cleared as being habitable. You may have other things that have gone on within your dwelling that have changed and have had a more drastic effect on you because of your mobility impairments than they would on the general population, and we ask the governments to come up with policies that address that. To the extent that they are using hotels and other types of entities to house people, we ask them to identify hotels with actually accessible hotel rooms which should be the norm as most of you know often is too -- is too unfortunately not the case. We ask them to prioritize those hotel rooms that are accessible for people with disabilities. These are the types of plans and policies that we want to see in place long before any disaster occurs because it really does make a huge difference to people with disabilities. Are there any questions on emergency management that have come in? >> TAJAUNA: No, there is not -- there are not any questions on that. I do have someone who is asking to know if you are going -- if you could talk about public access regarding individuals with multiple chemical sensitivity. >> MARY LOU: Actually, not going to be addressing that specifically. Lots of the issues that I am addressing aren't that specific to particular disabilities. Of course, for instance, in emergency planning there are lots of situations where somebody with MCS may be affected by a disaster differently or more severely than somebody who doesn't have MCS and we ask the communities and governments to plan for that ahead of time. For instance, if there is a forest fire in an area, somebody with MCS or asthma or severe respiratory condition may need to be evacuated when other people may be able to be safely housed in a shelter that is out of the immediate fire area but is still in a smokier location. We don't have anything specific to MCS in our agreements, but the concepts are there. I've already talked a little bit about sidewalks, and again, I'm still shocked at the number of communities that don't routinely put curb cuts in. We have very consistently said since 1993 that whenever a street is altered, it has to -- if you're improving it for other people, you have to improve it for people with disabilities as well, and when a street is altered is when there is remilling and repaving going on from basically curb to curb. Most streets in the country certainly most busy streets country because we're now almost 16 years after the passage of the ADA have had repaving done since the ADA went into effect. So in most intersections around the country there should be curb cuts already that comply with the ADA standards. And I am time and time again discouraged to find that that is not always the case. So the sidewalk provisions in our agreements although they are very straightforward tend to be the highest dollar amount when it comes to cities and counties complying with our agreement because there are so many curb cuts and -- well, there are so many intersections where a pedestrian halfway crosses the street and so many of them should have curb cuts or should have curb cuts that are done appropriately and don't and it's still is very surprising to me, but I guess that's my evite showing through. The next topic I want to talk about is one day services and programs and this is something that again is in our newer agreements, probably in the last two or three years. I worked pretty extensively on -- as one of the two Department of Justice liaisons to the Access Board doing the section 508 standards and really want to make sure that cities and counties out there are making their websites accessible. Now, Section 508 of The Rehabilitation Act doesn't apply directly to cities and counties. It only applies directly to federal government agencies, but the effective communication provisions that are in Title II of the ADA apply to all city and county programs, including those that are published on their webs. And during that same time frame where we've seen city governments and services lose so many personnel because they're trying to cut back on expenses, we have seen a lot of those services go on to the Internet as a better, more cost effective way to reach out to their citizens. And it's really important for us as those programs are going on the web to reach the webmasters who really do have a lot of control in making sure that those are done in an accessible format and, frankly, to instill good habits in them and good structure on their websites so that they won't have to go back ten years from now and retro fit a bunch of information that was put in an inaccessible format and that they do it right the first time. Just as we have with the emergency services, we have extensive technical assistance on our website that was developed out of Project Civic Access. We have the same thing for web-based services and programs. We have technical assistance specifically directed to Title II entities that walk their web masters through a variety of issues and shows them the kind of training modules that are out there under Section 508 of The Rehabilitation Act as well as other private and public consortium activities like the web accessibility initiative of the W3C and if I just turned into a computer geek instead of a lawyer, I apologize. Anyway, there are lots and lots of resources out there and effective communication is the talisman of ADA compliance in this area. So they need to pay attention to this and many of them haven't, but actually once you get the webmasters in the room and talk them through what's required, they are usually very excited about it and very helpful. Now we get to what's actually the bulk of our work under Project Civic Access, things that we've gone through so far are enormously important, but they don't take up the bulk of our investigation time. The next part is called physical changes to facilities and this is where we spend weeks and weeks, sometimes with teams of ten or more people out in the field doing that glamorous job of measuring toilets and ramps and everything else. And, yes, I have scooped snow away off parking spots to make sure there is an access aisle underneath. Yes, I've had the ink freeze in my pens and had to switch to pencils when I was in Omaha a year and a half ago and we were measuring things in parking garages during a blizzard. And we have done everything between baking and freezing and thats a lot of work these agreements that the body of the agreement is typically about 20 pages and then you get our attachments which if any of you have tried to download and print the last few years, any of the agreements in the last few years the larger communities are often four and five hundred pages of architectural issues that we've identified that they need to then fix. This is how we approach architectural issues. We look at new construction very strictly. We looked at alterations very strictly. We look at program access in terms of we may have -- like the city of Omaha, we divided the city into a grid. And in each -- we divided it into four quarters, and in the northwest, northeast, southwest and southeast, we made sure that there were accessible libraries in each and accessible golf courses and accessible swimming centers and accessible courts -- well, the courts we pretty much look at all of them. We try and make sure that when we're removing barriers in a facility, we are using the flexibility of program access in terms of figuring out how to do that. If they want to say the door width provides 30-inches instead of 32, that's not going to cut it for us. We need to make sure that that door is wide enough for people to actually use and that's 32-inches of clear space. So we provide a lot of flexibility in terms of other things if there is a round doorknob and a city or county will prop the door open during business hours and it's in a context where that makes sense like a reception desk that has inside an office and the office has a door out into the hallway and they can prop it open and you have some assurance that it's actually going to stay open, then we'll accept a program access solution that gives them flexibility of not changing the door that way. But we won't give them flexibility in terms of steeper than acceptable ramps or access aisles so the physical changes to facilities is by far the bulk of our work when we're in the field and when we're writing up the agreements and every time we go out, we make the facilities people come with us. We usually fly out on a Sunday, start our inspections on Monday, work through to Friday, and then if there is a second week, it starts over again on Sunday or Monday. Usually by Tuesday of the first week, the facilities people are pointing out problems to us that they've never noticed before. And there is this wonderful learning curve where we have all these lightbulb moments where they finally get it and they start looking for -- looking at things very differently after they've accompanied us even for just a day. So I see that we only have about ten more minutes before Tajauna is going to be wrapping up and I want to go through a couple more things. As I said every year we look at whether we need to include additional topics or not. This last year we included the topic in some of the agreements with cities and counties that actually had domestic violence programs, we included a lot of information on domestic violence programs and required them to evaluate their policies. We get some complaints that people with mental retardation, people who are deaf, et cetera, people with mobility impairments are turned a way when they are victims of domestic violence and need shelters. When they are turned a way because the shelter operator says they don't have the resources or the knowledge to take that victim in, then that victim goes back into the abuse situation and may never come out of that again. And that's a tragedy and it's something that we are focusing more and more on here at the Department of Justice. So we do have new provisions that specifically address programs for victims of domestic violence and abuse. We also do survey domestic violence shelters in the community, but it's interesting when we do those, we have to do it in a very nontraditional way. Usually we're out there and looking pretty official, carrying our computers and cameras and smart levels and tape measures and everything with us. When we look at a domestic violence shelter, it often looks like a regular home and a regular neighborhood and there aren't signs outside saying "Hey, this is a domestic violence shelter." Usually they need to stay incognito and blend in with the community to protect the victims and so it doesn't -- that kind of setting doesn't lend itself well for us to do a very visible, open, flashy survey in broad daylight of the accessibility features or lack thereof of a facility. So we have to be sensitive to that when we're actually out there looking at them. We certainly don't want any abusers to find out the location of a facility because we've tipped the hat as to where it is. In the domestic violence arena, again, we say that even if pets aren't normally allowed, somebody uses a service animal, the programs and shelters have to allow them in. We also look at where sometimes the person who has been the victim has family members who are also sheltering like children and we've heard of instances where a battered spouse who doesn't have a disability has kids with disabilities and they want to protect the kids and bring them with them and they are told, well, you can't bring all of your children. You can just bring the nondisabled ones and of course that's not acceptable either. One of the last things that we dealt with in domestic violence shelters because it's such a controlled environment, that many of them have drug free policies where if you're on any kind of medication, they don't want you staying in the shelter. And of course we have told them as part of our agreements that have addressed those that they have to modify those policies to allow people to bring disability-related medication with them to have access to that program. That covers our very basic subject areas. The other parts of the agreement are really the things they need to do to give us assurances that all of those important safeguards that they've agreed to and committed to are actually implemented. So we have a lot of reporting. We have a lot of -- we do go back to communities with our tape measures and cameras and check back the make sure the work is done right. We do a lot of architectural plan review for communities that are under Project Civic Access where if they're going to be building a new courthouse or park or anything else, they are required to submit their plans to us and we review those. And then we go out and measure things after it's been built and make sure it is accessible. Sometimes those reviews don't take place until a deadline has passed and that's exactly what was going on in Detroit. We would have gone back and looked at the curb cuts but we wouldn't have done them until they were required to have completed them which was January of 2007. Because P. V. A. was on the street and saw problems ahead of time, they went on and sued Detroit for not complying with the ADA and then we were able to find out ahead of time that there were problems ahead of our deadline. We found out there were problems and can get in and try and resolve that. And you all can be our eyes and ears and feet and wheels on the ground and bring problems to our attention as they come to your attention. And that's very helpful to us. So I'm happy to take any questions for the next five minutes or so. And I'll follow up later. >> TAJAUNA: We'll have a few for you to answer. The first one is actually going back to the individual who wanted you to address multiple chemical sensitivity. And it says if even your organization will not acknowledge the barriers to access that individuals with multiple chemical sensitivities suffer, how can we possibly attain accommodations? I am begging Mary Lou to please give us some type of guidance about how to request accommodations? And her concern was issues with fragrances in public places, federal buildings, libraries, et cetera. >> MARY LOU: I understand your frustration and I'm sorry that I'm being vague. I apologize for that ahead of time. We don't have a strong statement out there that I can stand behind and say that indeed people can't wear fragrances into public buildings. You're correct, we don't have that. If you are interested in pursuing that, the right way to do that is through the Access Board, which publishes the standards and through our regulatory coordination branch and if you want to send me any information I'm happy to send it on to the appropriate folks within my office. And I'm sorry I can't help you any more today. >> TAJAUNA: Thank you. All right, the next one says this is not meant to be critical, but are you concerned that your population-based selection process might be used as a precedent for some jurisdictions to attempt to avoid compliance? I point to New York, for example, who has in their recent court filings suggested that they should only provide accessible voting in areas where there is a proven, significant, disability population? >> MARY LOU: No, I'm really not concerned because we are so clear that every community has to comply with the ADA. It still is the smartest way for us to stretch our enforcement dollar to help the greatest number of people with disabilities to focus on where they are in high percentage -- high concentration. I think it's a good government decision and I really don't think communities are drawing from our selection of Project Civic Access locations that everybody else is off the hook. And, again, we supplement those demographic decisions with complaints from individuals and we do every time we're selecting new locations, we do select a number that are complaint driven as well without regard to the demographics behind those complaints. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. The next question asks, what is the best means to obtain good, statistical numbers of people with disabilities for emergency planning and support systems. >> MARY LOU: Time and time again I have found the best way to reach emergency planners is to speak their language. They use the 2000 census data. So when I have approached emergency planners, I have used the 2000 census data and that seems to resonate with them. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. This one is a little bit longer. It says dear Ms. Mobley, following up on the Red Cross shelter issue in Broward County, Florida, Fort Lauderdale, the Red Cross and the county emergency services department prohibited my service dog from Red Cross shelters after Hurricane Wilma. I was told by a deputy sheriff, a sergeant, that because of the emergency, my civil rights were suspended. This was two weeks after the storm. Additionally, none of the shelters had restrooms with toilet stalls allowing for transfer by people unable to make a standing transfer. This includes the special needs, quote-unquote, shelter. Showers were set up a few days after the hurricane, but no accessibility was provided. There were no tables in the cafeterias that were wheelchair accessible and no cots or beds at a height for transferring to and from a wheelchair. Things got so bad that the police allowed new vans to park in accessible parking spaces blocking access aisles and curb ramps and even the Red Cross bus providing health services parking -- blocking curb ramps so that wheelchair users could not get services. What do you suggest? >> MARY LOU: A couple of things: You are more than welcome to file a complaint with our office. I will take it very seriously. The second thing that you can do on your own is we have good technical assistance documents online and you should share them before and emergency with everyone you can think of that you don't -- that aggravated that situation because that should never happen to anybody. It's of course patently not true that your civil rights are suspended during any kind of an emergency. There may be practical things that come up that the nature of the emergency means that things are done differently, for instance, if you use a wheelchair and you're lifted off the top of a building that you are somehow able to get up to the top of the building because of an elevator or they may not be able to carry your chair in the helicopter evacuation, and it may be that there are things that are very different but you still have the same civil rights you have during nonemergency times. The things that you just described are unfortunate and typical of the types of complaints we get and I promise you that we take them very seriously. We've been meeting routinely with homeland security to address some of these from their standpoint as well because they have a good pipeline into the emergency management community, and we are working on even stronger technical assistance documents, but if you'll go on to our website at ADA.gov, there is a specific document on there looking at sheltering. And there is very clear language in there that's saying people should not be sent away because they have service animals. The accessibility of all the features needs to be maintained and that's the parking spaces and not parking in front of the curb ramps and that shelters need to be selected that have accessible showers and that have accessible toilets and it's not enough to have the -- what we call the alternate stall where you're making a -- you're going from standing position to a seated position on the toilet, but you have to be able to use one from wheelchair where you can transfer from the chair on to the toilet and back. So there is also a lot of information in there about cots and all sorts of stuff. So we have recognized those problems. We're trying to get the word out and you can help us do that and also bring specific instances such as the one you just mentioned to me to my attention and we'll go from there. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. And the last question is actually on a little lighter note. It asks are you doing any follow up with communities that were targeted by Project Civic Access? If so, what follow up is being done? >> MARY LOU: Oh, my goodness. We have quite a few people who are doing nothing but monitoring compliance with the agreements. We get -- for those four and five hundred page agreements, when we say the flushing control is on the wrong side of the toilet, we need a photo showing they've changed it before we'll check that one off the list. We've spent a huge amount of resources making sure that the changes that we require actually are carried out. And we do develop very close working relationships with the ADA coordinators, sometimes if they get savvy, they'll use us when their budget people are cutting back on the budgets to make changes. They'll, you know, use us and say you want to cut my budget but you really don't have my authority to do that because we have these legal obligations that we've committed to with the Department of Justice and here is the agreement and here is why I need my money. So we actually have a pretty good relationship with most of the people who are at the city and county level working on compliance with our agreements and to the extent that we hear citizen complaints of problems where the agreements aren't being carried out, we jump on those. >> TAJAUNA: Okay. Well, that's all the questions that we have and actually that's all the time that we have. So Mary Lou, thank you so very much. I believe that you've provided the audience with really terrific and important information. I hope all of you listening have learned from today's Web cast. Also know that this Web cast will be archived on ILRU's website which you can find by visiting www.ilru.org. Before closing, I would again like to thank our presenter, Mary Lou Mobley and I would like to acknowledge the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, NIDRR, who funds your host for today's program, the Disability Law Resource Project. I would also like to thank the in-house staff at ILRU who without their efforts this webcast would not be possible. They include Marj Gordon, Sharon Finney, Dawn Heinsohn, Vinh Nguyen, Maria del Bosque as well as the technical expertise provided by Rob Dickehuth and our realtime captioner, Marie Bryant. I encourage anyone with questions on the Americans with Disabilities Act to call the toll free number at 1-800-949-4232. We invite you to join us this Friday, April 21st, at 2:00 p.m. central standard time, to hear Marilyn Golden, policy analyst to present the webcast DOT proposes changes to ADA transportation regulations. Hear about the changes proposed and ask ADA transportation questions. During this Web cast, you will learn from ADA transportation expert Marilyn Golden about what this notice covers. Join in and interactive discussion about what policy modifications could be addressed in this rule-making and discuss additional issues and recent ADA transportation policy. For more about this Web cast or to see the schedule for future Web casts, please visit www.ilru.org. Again, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Mary Lou, and we hope you will all join us again. >> MARY LOU: Thank you, Tajauna.