Demand Better Disability Access in Charlotte

While the city and county have given July 14 the demeaning name of "Sanity Over Vanity Day" and declared July 26 "ADA Compliance day," the fact is that neither mental health care nor disability access in Charlotte is where it needs to be. While 16.6% of Charlotteans were living with a disability as of 2015, there are significant gaps in accessibility that need to be addressed. We call on Mayor Lyles, Charlotte City Council, Chairwoman Ella Scarborough, and the Mecklenburg County Board of County Commissioners to make real strides in the areas of mental health care and disability access, rather than simply paying lip service as is currently being done. In order to make the Charlotte area more accessible for people with disabilities, we ask for the following remedies from city and county government:

1. Conduct extensive training for all city and county employees, including law enforcement and transportation workers, regarding the rights of access for disabled persons, including service dog access.

2. Correct the discrepancy in Charlotte's dog licensing statute to recognize all disability service dogs, not just those used for seeing or hearing, bringing the Charlotte ordinance in line with federal and state guidelines that have been available since 2010.

3. Provide disability parking much closer to the courthouse, so that disabled individuals can access public services without the barrier that the long walk constitutes. This could take the form of allowing disability parking in the circle where patrol cars and news vans often park, cutting the often painful walk in half.

4. Provide a clear and decisive plan of action for providing affordable housing for residents with disabilities. While the efforts currently being made at the city and county level for affordable housing overall are admirable, we need concrete numbers and a solid plan of action to help residents with disabilities, who are affected by poverty at over twice the rate of non-disabled people (29% vs 12%, according to a 2014 report by the Census Bureau).

5. Work to erase the stigma of mental health by removing such insensitive value judgment terms as "sanity" from public documentation, and by encouraging local health care providers to treat mental health patients with dignity and respect rather than subjecting suicidal patients to humiliating strip searches and the confiscation of their undergarments, as at the Billingsley Rd. location.

6. Provide full transcripts of City Council and County Commissioners meetings online for Deaf/hard of hearing residents, as well as closed captioning for the videos posted online. The closed captioning could be done for free by copying the videos from the city's Facebook page over to Youtube, which has a built in captioning tool, and there is no justification for not having done so already.

7. Raise awareness among business owners of the rights disabled people have to access public accommodations (i.e., businesses that are open to the public) by including ADA fact sheets with all new business licenses. Useful examples of such fact sheets are available through the ADA National Network at www.adata.org.

8. Ensure that all graphics posted on city and county websites and social media include alt-tags with the image description, making them accessible via screen reader programs for visually impaired residents.

9. Partner with disability advocates in the creation of job descriptions, to ensure that artificial barriers unrelated to the work itself are removed. With the 2017 unemployment rate nationwide being twice as high for disabled individuals as for people without disabilities (9.2% vs 4.2%, per a report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in June 2018), the systemic barriers to livable employment for disabled residents must be addressed.

10. Replace traditional holiday fireworks with silent light shows, to better accommodate service dog handlers, autistic residents, and residents with PTSD (including disabled combat veterans), and tighten local restrictions on illegal fireworks brought in from out of state.

11. Create an advisory board made up of individuals with disabilities, health care providers, and community advocates to assist in making policies that enhance rather than detract from disabled residents' quality of life.

We hope that you will join us in building a Charlotte that is actually livable for all residents, not just the able-bodied.