What if you had a public building that was three stories tall and the elevator didn’t work? You’d wait til April to get it fixed, right? I guess, when you’re the City of Madison, you do.
The elevator in the Municipal Building, 215 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., has been out for weeks and we got the following email on October 18th about the situation:
Dear Folks:
Starting next week the upper two floors of the Madison Municipal Building may not be used to conduct any public meetings that must be conducted in accordance with the Open Meetings Laws.
The elevator has been declared to be unreliable and the subject of an emergency work project. Unfortunately, this entails a major rebuild of the elevator that will not be completed until approximately April, 2008.
At least for the time being, the elevator will remain in service but is subject to failure at anytime. No viable plan was identified to ensure accessibility for public meetings in the event of an elevator failure. Unfortunately, the elevator has reached a state where it is more likely to be out of service at any given moment than it is to be in service. Access to public meetings is required under both the ADA and the Open Meetings Laws.
This situation does not affect either the first floor or the lower (LL) level of the building. Access for persons with disabilities can be obtained to either of these floors from the exterior of the building. A door opener switch is being installed on the lower level back door for access purposes.
Please alert any of your staff to various boards, committees and commissions of this development. The boards, committees and commissions should also be alerted. In many cases they will need to identify suitable meeting facilities, amend their notices accordingly and make any necessary coordination with the folks at CitiChannel.
If you have meetings already noticed for next week, please look for a new location and issue a timely notice for the new location.
If you have any questions, please contact me or ACA Roger Allen.
Michael P. May
City Attorney
City of Madison
So far, this has contributed to the silly Plan Commission subcommittee meeting where several of us sat outside the room in the hallway where the back door was locked by the time I got there and the screwed up Board of Estimates meeting that wasn’t live on channel 12 and also crowded into a room that wasn’t big enough. However, it has allowed me to master the art of being in two places at once. Yesterday I looked at where I was going to meetings since it was all jumbled up and here’s what I found!
4:15 PM URBAN DESIGN COMMISSION MEETING AND PUBLIC HEARING ROOM LL-110 MMB
5:00 PM HOUSING COMMITTEE ROOM LL-110 MMB
Perfect! Unfortunately, they had it all sorted out and UDC runs behind, so I made it to both meetings and slipped into the Economic Development Commission to hear a bit from the guy that is doing our Economic Development plan.
April? As one developer muttered in a meeting “What would the City do if a developer had a building that had an elevator that didn’t work for 6 months?” and “Hell, I’d have it fixed in just a few days.” Where’s a good facilities manager when you need one?
