Standing in the doorway of the city’s crowded back conference room, East Avenue resident Caitlin Kenney couldn’t follow the council work session. Kenney has a hearing impairment and relies on lip reading to understand people.
Last week, Mayor John Lombardi III resisted the suggestion from aldermen to move the weekly public work session to the city’s council chambers to accommodate the public. One of Lombardi’s reasons was that he liked to talk face-to-face around the table.
But for Kenney, standing on the outside of the circle, seeing all the participants’ faces was difficult.
“I struggled with reading lips during the round table,” Kenney said Thursday. “I also struggle following everything during the council meeting. I catch some things, but not everything!”
Paul Wolf, an attorney and president emeritus of the New York Coalition For Open Government, said the crowded back conference room did not comply with the state’s Open Meetings Law.
Wolf referred to a section of the law that states, “Public bodies shall make or cause to be made all reasonable efforts to ensure that meetings are held in an appropriate facility which can adequately accommodate members of the public who wish to attend such meetings.”
“That’s the reason why the meetings should be fully accessible, especially since they have a regular chamber and (Kenney) could sit in front and see them,” said Doug Usiak, disability advocate and former CEO of Western New York Independent Living. “(Kenney) certainly has an argument that they did that on purpose to limit information from people with disabilities. She could complain to the state Division of Human Rights. I think she’d have a pretty good argument.”
Usiak said public meeting rooms need to be accessible to people with mobility issues as well.
For a business owner who used a wheelchair, Usiak said an Orchard Park board met with the individual outdoors as an accommodation.
“The council should have just relocated itself to the traditional chambers,” Usiak said. “This is what your taxes pay for. They keep asking for their taxes to go up, so they should make their meeting accessible.”