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The Lycoming County Commissioners approved the U.S. Department of Justice ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) checklist for polling places as the survey instrument to be used to assess the accessibility of county polling sites.
The move is the next step in trying to resolve issues at the sites which were cited following a visit by the DOJ to a number of counties in the U.S. Middle District. The commissioners had approved a settlement agreement with the DOJ at a previous meeting.
Of the 81 county polling places, the DOJ had determined that 25 were seriously in need of being fixed immediately. The remaining sites will now be assessed by the county as part of the settlement.
"One of the requirements of the agreement is that the county has a designated instrument, basically a set of criteria, that we will use to evaluate the accessibility of polling place facilities," said Forrest Lehman, director of Voter Services.
"It's very granular," Lehman said. "It envisions the entire path that a person would take starting with parking outside. How are they getting from the accessible space to the entrance, the path of travel? What happens at the main door, is it compliant then you're inside and what are you running into there? There are many steps involved."
For parking, the DOJ checklist states that "an accessible space is composed of three elements: the parking space, an access aisle adjacent to the space that is wide enough to allow voters with a mobility disability to get out of their car or van, and signage designating it as an accessible space."
The information in the document also gives solutions with very specific measurements if these criteria are not met.
Moving from a parking or drop-off area the checklist said, "there must be an accessible route from the accessible parking, passenger drop-off sites, sidewalks and walkways, and public transportation stops to get to the entrance of the voting facility. The accessible route must be at least 36 inches wide. It may narrow briefly to 32 inches wide, but only for a distance of up to 24 inches."
Once inside the polling place, "there must be an accessible route from the entrance through hallways, corridors and interior rooms leading to the voting area. The route must be free of abrupt changes in level, steps, high thresholds, or steeply sloped walkways," according to the DOJ's criteria.
Because the work of assessing the accessibility of the sites involves measurements and a number of requirements, Lehman said, "That's why we're going to have to go outside to be able to find professionals who are experienced in this area who can do that evaluation."
"There will be multiple entities that may go out. I may go out to some places to look at them from a layperson perspective to assess in some cases what I think the issues might be. That may let us make determinations about whether to keep a facility or resolve to correct it," Lehman said.
"However, the expert measurements and determinations about what are the accessibility issues that we need to correct are going to be done by experts who obviously know more about that and about that field than I do," he said following the commissioners meeting.
The next step will be to find those people who can do the work of evaluating the polling sites.
"I expect the county will be putting out a request for proposals to do that work and I should stress this, we're not talking about the construction work just yet," Lehman said.
"On the front end, this would be visiting the facilities and doing what we call surveying them. They're going to do the measurements. They'd be photographing, basically trying to identify what are the known accessibility compliance issues that will need to be corrected and backing that up with the measurements, the photographs, the data," he said.
That information would then be used to determine if and how the issues for that particular facility could be corrected. Then a construction plan for correcting the issues would be formulated or the county may decide to move the polling place to a different site.
"When we talk about a precinct or the facility we're using as the polling place for that precinct, every one has its own puzzle, because in some cases, you may look at the facility and say, okay, we're gonna correct it and keep it. In some other cases you may decide to change it," Lehman said.
If a new polling site needs to be found, one solution could be to have two precincts voting at the same site, a practice called co-locating, which is already in use in Old Lycoming Township.
"We have first and second precincts that both vote in the firehall there. You go into the reception hall there. If you go left its first precinct; you go right it's the second. It's still separate polling place operations because they have separate tables and equipment and poll workers and everything, but they're but they're located in the same space, you know, but with some physical demarcation," he said.
"That could be a solution in some instances, but it's a lot of puzzle pieces that have to be analyzed to get to a solution in each case," he added.
Lehman said he understands that people see this as just another mandate from the federal government, one which comes with a cost to the counties.
"They're telling counties you have got to do something, and you know, it's gonna be really expensive. It's easy for them to say, not easy for us to do. I get it," Lehman said. "But also I'm a simple man. If I see a settlement agreement or a court order, I'm going to follow it."
"In addition to that, I'm sure a lot of voters in this county who have disabilities, perhaps of varying degrees, and all of them would benefit from this. And then even in addition to that, the conversations that have been had in this room today and previous weeks about generational infrastructure improvement -- the need for that, the success we've had at it," Lehman said.
"This is another one of those projects where this is county dollars that would hopefully in the long term benefit, a lot of different facilities that we use as polling places, various institutions such as municipal buildings and fire halls and churches that are all the building blocks of our democracy several times a year when we have elections. But on every other day of the year, those improvements will benefit all the other constituencies that use those buildings. And I think that's a very good thing if we can make that happen," Lehman said.
The settlement also required that an ADA coordinator be appointed. The county's Director of Administration was approved for that position.