Thank you very much. Good afternoon. For those of you that are in your afternoon mode and good morning for those of you in some of our far-reaching time zones. I hope everyone is having a good day and ready to spend the next 90 minutes with us on this particular session today. Today''s session is part of our regularly scheduled sessions. This session in March is going to be focusing on the international building code and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility guidelines, what does it mean when a state has adopted the international building code and how does that interface or interact with the Americans Disabilities Act and its accessibility guidelines. This is part of our regular series of sessions held each month on the third Tuesday of every month on a various topics around the Americans with Disabilities Act and associated legislation. This project is one that is shared by the 10 disability and business technical assistance centers across the United States and we have been doing this now for almost three and a half years and it is our attempt to try to give some type of information in a short and sweet, allow you to stay in your own home area and still get some information that will be useful to you to be able to use in the job and in things that you do. This particular session is also real time captioned on the internet for those of you that are interested and you can access that information at www.adagreatlakes.org and follow the link for the real time captioning. The captioning will then be, the transcript from the caption will be edited and we will post it on our website for future archival purposes. In addition, the session today is being digitally recorded and the digital recording will also be made available for future viewing and listening for those that are interested. Our session next month will be offered as well and so I hope that individuals who are interested this month and this session will be interested in next session. I will cover that a bit before-more before we get off the air today so you know the topic and what to expect. We are joined today by Brian Black, who is our speaker and he is the director of building codes and standards for The United Spinal Association, which is formerly the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association and they are transitioning to the new name. And it represents association members and others with disabilities on the national, international organization that write accessibility requirements. He brings over 25 years of work in very free design regulation to his job. He is currently the of the A 117 accredited standards committee that develops the barrier free design requirements that are referenced in building codes and serves as a basis for the federal Americans with Disabilities Act construction requirements. He served on federal committees that proposed major revisions to ADA design requirements and was rewarded a National Performance Review award by Gore (Vice President Gore) for his efforts in this area. He is also a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and is a member of the platform lift committee that establishes safety criteria for wheelchair lifts. He chaired the limited application elevator committee of ASME A 117 elevator safety code committee. I know these are all technical things, but they are very important and ushered new rules through the ASME A117 model building code and ADA revisions to establish a more cost efficient for building space with requirements for multi story access. He will talk little bit about that today in the limited use elevator discussion. Representing paralyzed veterans and others with spinal cord injury, Brian has been the principal disability representative in development of the international code council and has a member of the national fire protection association and FPA 5000 building code committee. He authored numerous articles on the ADA, fair housing, vertical accessibility and life safety for persons with disabilities published nationally in standard building the code official and fire protection engineering magazines. He is a graduate of Michigan State University from the Great Lakes region where he received a BA in special education for the blind. So we are very pleased to have Brian join us today and bring his expertise to this particular session and I strongly encourage you to save up your questions for clarification or other information that you would like from Brian, as we will be entering into a question and answer period later in the session and we will give you instructions on how to do that when the time comes. So at this time, I would like to turn over the session to Brian.
Thank you very much. I want to thanks both Robin Jones and the Great Lakes ADA center for setting this up. Earlier this year, Robin contacted us and wondered whether we wanted to present a long-distance learning module presentation question, and I quote, My state has adopted the IBC, International Building Code and What Does That Mean For Compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG)? I have done training programs, or I have written training programs for the internet before, but I have never actually done one live, so this is very strange United Spinal Association does a lot of training, both in our training and in the eastern part of the country and also now that we have become a national organization, we are starting to branch out into Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, North Dakota, I believe, and elsewhere. The nice thing about doing a live presentation is obviously we have to come out beforehand and set things up and we have an opportunity to talk to folks beforehand and kind of get a context of what we should be talking about, if we are talking about residential construction, we will know we are talking about independent living people that might have a different perspective than, say, a code enforcement official that would have a different perspective than an architect. Facing a blank wall and having to do this it is extremely interesting and I think I look at the question that we were asked to answer, I can envision two ways that the people might ask this question. The first one could be perhaps an architect who would say this is great. My state adopted the international building code. Oh, yeah, now, by the way, what does that do for my ADA obligations? The reverse side of that could be, we just found out that our state adopted that IBC building code thing, and is that going to mess up compliance with the ADA and the ADA accessibility guidelines? Not knowing who is listening to me, I guess I will just have to find out during the question and answer period just what version of the question actually was being asked. If you look at slide number 1, that is the other thing, I have tell you looking at slide number 1, I kind of massaged the whole issue we are talking about today, using the term harmonization, which is a familiar term, both for the Federal Access Board and for the International Building Code folks. Because, as you will see, it is something we have been working on for quite sometime, and the issue is, as you see, where the civil rights mandates of the ADA join with the general welfare requirements of the IBC, International Building Code and how do those two things dove tail together and are there things that they conflict with or conflict with one another when it comes to dealing with civil rights on one hand and building construction on the other hand. A little bit about United Spinal, on slide 2, as Robin mentioned, we were formerly known as the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association and have been around since 1946, serving initially just veterans with spinal cord injury and disease. Now that we have become a national organization we serve people with spinal cord injuries or disease regardless of whether they are veterans or not, includes little kids, for instance, we are getting involved with children''s accessibility issues. Just as a side, for people, I know a lot of people always worry about handicapped parking. That was created by the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans New York City back in 1948 or ''49 I believe. So we have been involved with building code issues since the ''40''s principally because the vast majority of our members use wheelchairs or some other type of orthotic device and rely on accessibility in the built environment in their daily lives. In the interest in full disclosure and you will probably get a sense of this in my introduction, we are very strong proponents of the use of building codes for the advancement of the accessibility in our built environment and specifically we are fairly strong proponents of the use of the international building code. We feel that posing the international building code as opposed to Americans with Disabilities Act is a false premise. I think that both of those can work together to a common good and certainly I think that our thoughts on this have been shared both by the international codes counsel and by the access board the past dozen years or so. As a shameless plug I would like to say you have got my phone number and you have our website. We are there whether you are an advocate that is working on a particular disability issue or you are an architect with a design problem or you are a state agency that is trying to work on accessibility problems in an existing building, for instance. We are there to help in any way we can, in addition to myself, we have a full team of advocates. We have a full architecture department. We have a legal staff as well that deals with obviously things like lawsuits as a last resort, thankfully. But we are there to help and certainly calling us on the phone does not cost anybody anything and we will do what we can to help you with your particular issues. Looking at the handouts, there were a number posted on the web. I only intend to use one and that is the, or to site one and that is the one that relates to wheelchair seating in assembly areas and the technical requirements of the various standards. The other two ones, one is in PDF format and I apologize that was the only format I could get. The others are more for your information and for background so that as you go back to your offices and start looking at, you know, what does the IBC require or what does May, the new ADA require, ADA accessibility guidelines, you will have a document in front of you that you can refer to. Going to slide number 3, I would like to give little bit of background on how we have gotten to the point right now where the question of how does the IBC effect the ADA accessibility guidelines compliance in my state, really is an important question to ask at this time. Back in 1988, the model legacy codes began to write common accessibility requirements. If you look at the early ''80''s, the legacy codes are the code groups that combined in 2000 to become the international codes counsel that writes the IBC. They were the building officials and code administrators used in the Great Lakes area. Southern building code congress used in the southern part of the state and the international conference of building officials that was used typically west of the Mississippi. They all had their own building codes and if you looked at their model building codes back in the early ''80''s, I am trying to be generous here, they were kind of atrocious or pathetic when it came to requirements for accessibility for people with disabilities. One or two pages, you know, building code is a thick book and it tells you all the things you have to do to construct a building. Then almost as an afterthought, there were again those one or two pages that said, yeah, maybe some of these types of buildings, maybe real big buildings or maybe state-owned buildings we should worry about accessibility. In the late ''80''s, the model code groups realized that that was, they could do a lot better and in 1988, they joined together to try to coordinate their various code requirements from their three model codes into something that they could all use. And in doing so, they started with a new premise. For the model code groups, I think this fairly revolutionary. Why don''t we instead of saying what has to be accessible out there and then cherry pick what we think ought to be accessible, why don''t we just start with the premise that everything in the world ought to be accessible? If you are going to build a brand new building, just assume that everything has to be accessible. If you are going to alter a building, assume that every time you touch something that is effected by the accessibility requirements, you have to make it accessible. Then what we will do is with that global approach, we will start creating exceptions to the rules, start backing off of that so that the exceptions to the rule are actually quite small. An example might be if I am going to build a new Holiday Inn, my assumption under model codes is everything that I do in that hotel has to be fully accessible. Then the model codes in 1988 well maybe 100% codes is not necessary, so why dont we say no, only 5% of the rooms have to be accessible to persons who use wheelchairs, but everything else has to be accessible. This, again, I think was a fairly radical approach at least from the world of model building codes at that time. The other new concept they came up with is what is referred to as main streaming, and it was actually the person ended up being the executive director of the BOCA group who was sitting in a long meeting in Florida, if I recall, and said you know people are right, you people advocates in the audience, if you are right and this accessible is so God awful wonderful, it should not be in the accessibility chapter, we should say put it all over the That is in effect what main streaming is. If you look at Chapter 11 of the international building code, which is the accessibility chapter and you try to find what are the requirements for visible alarm appliances for people who are deaf in a business occupancy, you will not find it there because the visible alarm requirements are in fact in the fire detection or fire system section of the code, chapter 9. If you want to look at stairs, how do I build a stair that is a, quote, accessible stair that has the proper geometry, has the proper nosing configuration so people do not trip, has the proper hand rails so people are safe, that is not a quote handicapped issue. That is an issue that benefits everyone, so why we want to put it in the accessibility chapter? Let us put it in chapter 10 in this deals with how to build stairs. Protruding objects is the third case where protruding objects are prescribed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accessibility standards so you cannot stick a drinking fountain out into a hallway such that someone who is blind or low vision or isn''t paying attention runs into it as they''re walking down the hall. The model code group says well, this makes sense for everyone. You do not have be blind to smash into a drinking fountain. It is a lousy design to start putting them in the corners. Why don''t we take the protruding objects requirements of the accessibility standard and throw them into the body of the code. You will not find that i-if you are looking for protruding object requirements, again in, Chapter 11 of the accessibility standards. After that initial thing happened, as you all know, 1988 came along and some more in the housing amendment was passed, in 1990, Americans with Disabilities Act was passed and by President Bush, and then in 1991, in break neck speed, the federal access board published the ADA accessibility guidelines and those adopted by reference by both the U.S. department of justice and the department of transportation. At about the same time ADAAG was being passed, the three model building codes were taking that formula that was developed in 1988 and started plugging it into the respective codes such as the BOCA national building code or the southern standard building code and the like. Going on to slide 4, the ANSI standard, I am assuming you all know what the ANSI standard is, when I say ANSI standard it is ANSI A117.1 standards for accessible and usable buildings and facilities. A new addition of the ANSI standard was published in 1992 and then 1994 came along and something huge, in my opinion, happened on the federal level. My experience with the feds particularly post ADA, if you will, was, and I say the feds in the most endearing terms, believe me, was that some people felt, well, we have written the federal accessibility requirements by writing the ADA accessibility guidelines were then referenced in regulations of the department of justice. So people who write building codes really should not be doing that. They should just pay attention to what we have already done and just fall into line. In 1994, there was a huge paradigm shift that came principally from some fairly brave souls on the staff of the federal access board and they said, you know, rather than looking at it as a hierarchy where we are Federal Government who has written a federal regulation for a federal civil rights law and then there is all these building codes scattered across the country, rather than having that type of a hierarchy, why don''t we look at this as a partnership and rather than looking at the building code groups with suspicion, maybe we should see them as partners instead. My background was in the disability rights movement and I can attest to the fact that at least when I was in the back 20 years ago, the disability rights movement had a lot of suspicion of building codes because quite frankly, building codes back then had a bit of a failure for people with disabilities and the federal access board staff, and the board itself, said that does not make any sense. We can write a federal law if we can join hands with the model code community, the net effect is that it is a win-win situation. We have a federal law that can be adjudicated in the federal court system that can be investigated by the department of justice and that is all well and good. The model building code community can bring us literally tens of thousands of enforcement officials who are enforcing the design of buildings on main street in downtown USA and they are doing it right there. They are doing it anyway. We might as well look at how they deal with accessibility and maybe if we can try to harmonize what we do on the federal level with what they are requiring on the state and local levels through the building codes, again we will end up with a win-win situation. That ended up creating the federal-that decision ended up creating the ADAAG federal advisory committee that started in 1994 and worked through 1996 and ended up publishing a draft new ADAAG at that time. Immediately after that, the model building codes tried to respond and say, okay, let''s see if we can get as many of these ideas into our building codes as possible and you started seeing initial harmonization legacy codes in 1996. In 1998, the ANSI standard was due a revision and the ANSI standard that is now on the street, the 1998 version, if you look at it, if you are familiar with what the draft ADAAG looks like, you will see that they are very, very similar and there are very few discrepancies in the technical requirements of what is being enforced through building codes and what the federal access board has proposed new ADA accessibility guidelines. In 1999, the federal access board published their notice of proposed rulemaking for the new ADAAG and that hit the streets and the international building code was suddenly coming into being because the international codes council was created by those three older code groups and by 2000, the international building code was first published. And again, it reflected many of the things that were seen in the new ADA, new proposed ADA accessibility guidelines. Going to Page 5, last but not least, in 2001, the code requirements for housing accessibility was published. That has little, if anything, to do with the ADA accessibility guidelines. It is related to the federal fair housing act and-but I think particularly for those who have to comply with federal accessibility laws and for those advocates who want to see them better enforced, it is important that we not forget that the fair housing act is out there and the model codes have been responding to that. In April 2002, the final draft ADA accessibility guidelines were again put out on the street on a limited basis and this was another big boost for harmonization. It allowed the international building code committee and groups to further fine tune this harmonized document and further make sure that the IBC requirements would reflect as best possible what the, what we all think the new ADA requirements will eventually look like. Again, I have to say that the access board as a group, I think was very insightful in their decision to give us that last burst of information so we could continue the harmonization process. And access board staff participated in helping to draft some of the proposed changes to the IBC to see that harmonization be successful. Last, but not least, just in last part of January, the access board submitted its final guidelines for approval to the office of management and budget, so it is going through the processes and the federal level at this point hopefully for final approval by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and for adoption as part of the regulations by the department of justice and the department of transportation, and last, but not least, the international building code of 2004 supplement is going to be hopefully-well, it will be complete indeed May. And I will talk about the importance of that in a second. This walk through memory lane has a point. Why are you telling me all this stuff? And actually, three points that I would like to mention, and that I think are relevant to our discussion today. The first is that it is important people be aware that the code groups were not dragged kicking and screaming into this process of improving accessibility requirements within the model building codes. That has become kind of arms-through the past years probably because they were working on their stuff at around the same time that the ADA was being formulated and the guidelines were being published and some people thought well, those silly building officials, they do not care about accessibility, but they were forced to do it because of the ADA. That simply was not true. The model code groups are a partner in the process of improving accessibility for people with disabilities. Secondly, the technical access accessibility criteria of the A 117 accessibility standard has gone through four revisions since 1980. So it is significantly different than the old 1980 document, but if you look at the ADA accessibility guidelines and then you look back at its predecessor, which was the uniform federal accessibility standard, those documents were based on the 1980 ANSI standard. So there is this huge disconnect between what the Federal Government is requiring in terms of the science of accessibility, if you will, and where the science of accessibility has advanced since the 1991 ADAAG was published. Obviously the access board saw that as a concern as well because that is why they are making the changes they are. Last, but not least, the access board and its staff has begun a process where enforcement of the international building code is almost going to be a de-facto enforcement of the ADA guidelines. Please underline almost when I say that. So looking again at that question that was raised by Robin a few months ago, in My State Adopted the International Building Code What Mean for Compliance with ADAAG? If you turn to slide 7, my answer is who knows? And I am being a little facetious, but it is a question with an answer that is in flux at this point in time. The question actually has a false premise, although I think it is an excellent question because it is one we hear all the time when we do our training. Compliance with a state or local building code really has no bearing on compliance for the federal civil rights law. Building codes tell you how to construct buildings. The Americans with Disabilities Act is a federal civil rights law that is not dissimilar from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the civil rights protections of various people whether it is based on race and ethnicity or gender or age are afforded through federal law, they are two totally different worlds in many ways. They just happen to look alike because they ultimately end up addressing the things like how wide does the door have to be or how steep can a ramp be? I think the actually the question is will the building code and specifically the international building code that is being adopted by this generic state out there, is it going to invite conformance with or violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the rest of my presentation I hope to answer at least some of that overriding question. Page 8 starts to, or slide 8, excuse me, starts to get into some of the problems with answering that question. As you can see, the question is going to be which international building code are we talking about? Is it the 2000 edition that has been on the street since then or is it the 2003 edition which is now being adopted by a number of states. The state of Michigan just recently adopted the 2003 series of the international codes and the accessibility requirements in 2003 are significantly more detailed and in my opinion better than what we had in 2000. Also, which ADA accessibility guidelines are we talking about? Are we talking about the ones from 1991 or are we talking about the ones that hopefully, and I am keeping my fingers crossed, will be published and approved by this year''s end. Hope-obviously trying to compare 2003 document with a 1991 document is kind of unfair and it is an apples and oranges sort of thing particularly because the access board has worked so hard to update their document, but unfortunately has not had the opportunity to get it out on the streets yet. Looking to Page 9 to just kind of give you a visual of my impression of where we are in terms of what does the IBC look like as opposed to or when compared with the ADA accessibility guidelines, and please understand that none of these pie charts are statistically derived. I did not sit down and do a word count and compare and contrast between the two documents. It is my general sense of where we stand when we compare the various documents. So if I look at the 2000 international building code and compare it to the current ADA accessibility guidelines, my guesstimate is that the similarities are probably about 85%. So the down side is there is probably 15% of the text alone has substantial differences between the IBC and the ANSI standard that it references and the ADA accessibility guidelines. Particularly when you deal with technical differences, this becomes very problematic. Again, because the technical differences have evolved in the various revisions of the ANSI standards. So, for instance, clearance in front of water closets or at water closets, known as toilets, is different between the ADA and the international-ADA accessibility guidelines and the international building code. The ADA accessibility guidelines allows a lavatory or sink to encroach into that clear floor space that is required for a water closet where as the international building code does not allow that at all. You cannot put a lavatory within 42 inches of the center line of the, of the water closet under the international building code. Another huge difference is maximum reach range. If you look at the current ADA accessibility guidelines, it says that if I can get a parallel approach to a control or operating mechanism that is mounted on a wall, for instance like a light switch, I can have that switch 54 inches above the floor and that is still considered accessible. The international building code says no, that is not accessible. It has to be 48 inches. We expect a lower mounting height for accessible features in the IBC. Just as an aside, although if you look at the ANSI standard and look at the diagram the guy in a wheelchair reaching up for a 48-inch high max. That actually was advocated by a group by the name of The Little People of America who found that significant number of their constituents who typically have dwarfism and short stature could not reach things that were 54 inches high, so that is where the 48 came from. Some other changes, accessible means egress requirements, how do you get out of a building in case of a fire? Are significantly different between the 1991 ADAAG and the international building code requirements, and quite frankly, trying to meet both requirements can get very, very confusing. Often times just because they were written so radically different from one another, not that the end result is that different, but they are formatted a lot differently from one another. Just as an aside, the federal access board at least in its draft standard indicated that it intended to adopt by reference the international building code means of egress requirements. So that disparity that we see right now between the two documents will disappear should the draft ADAAG end up looking the same as the final ADAAG. And last, but not least visual alarm requirements, when we do instruction for the AIA, the American Institute of Architects and we feel cruel, we say the neat thing about visible alarm requirements is you can comply with the international building code and violate with Disabilities Act, or you can violate the Americans with Disabilities Act and then not get a building permit because you just cannot, the two are so different from one another, a lot of the technical requirements are different. My understanding is that the federal access board staff has been telling people that if the national fire protection association fire alarm code, then that is equivalent facilitation and that is sufficient for meeting your ADA requirements and both the international building code and the new ADA accessibility guidelines are going to say you want to worry about visible alarms in your buildings, do not even look to us anymore. Look to the NFPA 72 fire alarm code and that will meet all of our accessibility standards as well. If we go to slide 10 and look at 2000 IBC versus the ADA accessible guidelines, which are the new draft guidelines, I think the differences have dropped considerably so that, again, hypothetically there is only about a 4% difference between the international building code in 2003 and what the federal access board published as their draft ADA/Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) accessibility guideline. ADA, I think we all know the ADA as the Americans with Disabilities Act. ABA is the 1969 Architectural Barriers Act which brings its own different scoping requirements, so that is why you get that title. They have been kind of combined into a single document, although they deal with different, different pieces of legislation. Again, I think the difference are probably about 4% different and the reason is that the 2003 international building code still relies on the old 1998 ANSI standard for some of its technical requirements. Last, but not least, when we look at slide 11, I think the differences are going to be I do not know, 1, 1.5% between the two documents once the ADA/ABA accessibility guidelines finally hit the streets and the international building code can be supplemented in its 2004 run, 2004 supplement to the international building code and the single reason for that is that when that 2004 supplement is finally approved in May of this year, I-it is almost 100% sure that the 2003 ANSI standard is going to be approved for adoption by reference. The 2003 ANSI standard picked up lot of the stuff that the federal access board created in its document, so things like children''s environments, which is currently part of ADAAG, but not enforced yet by Department of Justice (DOJ). Things like what does an accessible correctional facility look like or an accessible courtroom look like, those types of technical issues will be brought to the fore and be included in 2004 by the 2004 supplement of the IBC. So there is going to be in my guess is about 1% difference between the two. If you compare requirements to requirements. One thing to bear in mind, however, is that 1% has got some real significant stuff in it and I will touch upon that in just a little bit. It is not that they are inconsequential. They are just going to be 99% agreement between the two documents as opposed to the 85 that we have right now. What are some of the things, or where are some of the areas where the international building code is more restrictive than both the existing 1991 ADAAG and the new ADAAG? This is on slide 12. Let me step back for a second. I have been, I have been talking a lot about ADAAG as opposed to the ADA and I think the distinction is critical. The ADA accessibility guidelines are just that. They tell you how to design a new building or how to alter an existing building to comply with the federal civil rights mandate of the ADA. They are just a tiny portion of Americans with Disabilities Act sets of requirements, as I am sure most of you know, they are requirements for employment, requirements for TTY relay systems in the states, but even when you look at building design, there needs to be a distinction made between what does the ADA accessibility guideline published by the federal access board require, and then what additional requirements are put in through the department of justice regulations? So a lot of the things that we are looking at today, I am looking at ADAAG, the technical document, the guidelines for construction standards and not necessarily the ADA in its entirety. Looking again at slide 12, the IBC is more restrictive than either the old or the new ADAAG in a number of ways. First of all, churches and other religion entities are covered by the international building code and they are not covered by, for the purposes of construction, by the ADA accessibility guidelines. So if I have got a new congregational church that is being built down the road from and I am an IBC jurisdiction, the IBC does not generally make a distinction between that congregational church and a secular meeting room or a, an auditorium of some sort. Other religion entities such as universities are also covered by the international building code, at least as written and are not covered by the ADA accessibility guidelines. Changes of occupancy is another animal that is unique to building codes. If I have a business occupancy, real estate office and I convert my real estate office into a shoe store, the international building code says that just by virtue of changing from one use group to another use group, from going to a business group to a mercantile group, I am going to impose on you certain accessibility requirements. The international building code says when you decide that you are going to, you know, not be a realtor anymore and you are going to start selling shoes, when you go in and alter your space, any alterations that occur within that place, I am going to take out the front desk and I am going to put in some shoe racks, any alterations that occur have to meet all of our alteration requirements and that is very similar to what the ADA says. The ADA accessibility guidelines say if you are going to convert a real estate office into a shoe store and you have to alter the building, alterations have to comply with the ADA accessibility guidelines. But the building code says above and beyond that, were going to have some other things we want you to do such as you have to make the building entrance accessible, toilet rooms are provided, accessible parking is provided, that an accessible route from the parking area to the accessible entrance is provided. Even if that, the cost of doing so exceeds 20% of your base alteration costs and if you are familiar with the ADA accessibility guidelines, when you make alterations a primary function area in a building, you have an obligation to spend up to 20% more to in sure that there is a path of travel to that primary function area. The international building code does say pretty much the same thing when it comes to alterations, but when it talks about changes of occupancy, it says, you know, I do not care that making that front entrance to your building accessible is going to exceed 20% of your alteration costs to the building. You still got to into it. Fair housing requirements, again, I touched on those very briefly and those are, again, the international building code and the ANSI standard has both made a concerted effort to try to reflect the fair housing act, or fair housing accessibility guidelines. There is an elevator exception that I have got a different slide for. Unisex toilet rooms where the IBC is more restrictive than the ADA accessibility guidelines. I have got a separate slide for that. Then one that you do not see on slide 12 is, again, the main streaming concept that I talked about before so that even if you are not doing anything that triggers, quote, accessibility, unquote, you often times are going to be improving the usability of the built environment just by meeting other requirements in the building code If I am building stairs, I am adding stairs to a building because I have an additional exit requirement in my building. Those stairs are going to meet all of the accessibility requirements found in the current ADAAG, even though it is not considered an accessibility improvement for the purposes of the IBC. Turning, then, to, to slide 13, I know about talking to those of you who are advocates I, I guess we are probably all advocates or you would not be listening in, talking to those people who are principally advocates in the audience, but-I do not know about you, but when the ADA came out, it did real harm when it came to fair housing because everyone said the ADA this and the ADA that and people forgot about fair housing, or it seems that way. Quite frankly as an aside, we do deal with a lot of complaints on accessibility out there and we find far more violations of the fair housing act than we do for the Americans with Disabilities Act. What the IBC did working with Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and United Spinal Association was involved, a number of other disability associations were involved, home building-builders were involved, is they tried to make the international building code in, a sense a safe harbor for fair housing. If you look at slide 13, you will see this a letter from then HUD secretary Andrew Como under the previous administration in the second sentence it says this document, the code requirements for housing accessibility will serve as a safe harbor for compliance with the Fair housing act. The document may be used by state and local jurisdictions, as well as builders and architects designing and constructing new multi family housing that is covered under the fair housing act. The CHRA, the second refers to was kind of an interim document that was floating around in 2001. All of the CHRA, the code requirements for housing access are now found in the 2000 edition of the IBC. So in effect the IBC 2003, if architect or builder meets those requirements, he is meeting the fair housing requirements as well, which obviously benefits the builder or the architect because the risk of lawsuits or complaints is negligible at that point. Then obviously it benefits people with disabilities because you are getting more accessibility in the environment for doing that. The elevator exception that you see in slide 14 is another I would say it is the single largest difference between the IBC and the ADA accessibility guidelines, and the IBC is in fact very, very more restrictive and provides a huge amount of access through this as compared to what the ADA requires. And you see the two requirements side by side there. The ADA says you do not have to put an elevator in a building. Now, setting aside the state and local governments have to put in elevators and certain types of buildings such as transportation facilities, offices of health care providers, you do not get an elevator exception, but generally the ADA accessibility guidelines say I can build a two-story building, let us say it is an insurance office, and of unlimited size and that 2-story building does not have to have an elevator to meet the ADA requirements. The other is that I could build a theoretically, I could build a 20-story building and if none of my stories exceed 3,000 square feet, the ADA does not care if you put an elevator in that building or not. Obviously no one is going to build a 20-story building without an elevator, but if you do so, it is not a civil rights violation under the ADA. The IBC, and where the confusion often times arises, they both use 3,000 square feet as a trigger, but in radically different ways. If you do not see the differences, you say, oh, yes, 3,000 and 3,000 it is the same thing. The IBC says an accessible route to a space is not required when that space, that story or mezzanine is above or below the accessible level or levels of a building, and it has an aggregate of 3,000 square feet or less. So in a two-story building, if I have 2,900 square feet on my second story, the international building code says I do not need and elevator or I do not need vertical access into that space. The ADA says the same thing. However, the ADA says I could build a building with 100,000 square feet on my second story and if it is an insurance office, we are not going to require an elevator to that second story, whereas the IBC says now as soon as you cross that 3,000-square foot threshold, you will need an elevator in that building. This is critical. This, I think, is the single largest, again, the single largest difference between the two documents and particularly for members of United Spinal Association, it is a huge improvement that speaks well to the international building code because obviously if you are in a wheelchair, you do not use stairs that often, if at all, and having an elevator in a building is a lot better than not having an elevator in the building. I should just say as an aside as another model building code that is being used in some jurisdictions in this country that did not do this, they said no, we will go with what the ADA requires, so that other model building code out there does not provide the level of access the international building code does. Last, but not least, with this, why was this not harmonized? Why would the access board not adopt what the international building code is doing because it would provide so much more access? Well, the answer to that is the elevator exception is written into the legislative text of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So the access board would have no authority to change what it says. It cannot provide for elevators where congress does not allow it to provide for elevators, My guess is certainly the staff, and I have to believe all the access board members would have loved to have said we want more access in all new construction, but again the law itself prohibited them from telling, from doing so. Slide 15 is a thing called unisex toilet rooms that is in the international building code that is not in ADAAG, the new ADAAG or the old ADAAG. Frankly, the access board could have put it in there if they wanted, but they said no, let''s see if the model building codes, if it works just in the building codes and I think it does. What this says, and you can read all the details if you want, but it is for people who have a disability who need assistance from someone of the opposite sex, either from a caretaker or a spouse or a friend so that if you are going to the shopping mall and you need, suddenly need use the rest room and a 78 year old man with his wife, currently they are faced with a dilemma do we bring my husband into the women''s room or I do have to follow my husband into the men''s room to help with toileting and it is very uncomfortable and not a good thing at all. So what this section of the international building code says is that in certain large mercantile occupancy stores, shopping malls and the like, in certain assembly occupancies like airports and hockey arenas and huge movie theaters, like a Cineplex movie theater, in addition to having every single men''s and women''s room accessible, we want an additional unisex single-use toilet room to provide for that particular need. Some of my colleagues have also referred to it as a family-friendly room. I think there is at least one shopping mall out in the Maryland area that calls it a family room. was meant to provide better access for people with disabilities, it obviously has benefits for other people as well for a mother with a young son who is going to the YMCA and she needs to use the locker room and does not want to bring her five year old son into the locker room nor does she want to send her five year old son into the men''s locker room without assistance. Let''s take a look at the opposite side of this. I have talked about where the IBC exceeds the ADA requirements or the ADA accessibility requirements On slide 16, you will see where does the ADA exceed the international building code? In posing that question, I use the term ADA purposely. We are looking not just at the ADA accessibility guidelines, but the ADA requirements for accessible construction, which includes the department of justice regulations and in some instances the department of transportation regulations. The first thing is that the international building code does not reflect the Title II requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act DOJ regulations. Probably the most significant thing there is that the ADA regulations do not permit Title II buildings, or Title II entities, those are being state or local government entities, the elevator exception that we just spoke of and said if you are building a two story building, we want to see an elevator in that building. Wh-let me finish going down the list and then we will talk some of these things are. The department of justice regulations has what I refer to here as the three-year alteration rule. Essentially, it gives justice the ability to look at a building undergoing alteration and take any alterations that occur within a three-year time period and say, okay, we are going to look at that to determine whether you have met your additional obligations under the path of travel rule to maybe provide a wheelchair lift to get into the building. I think the fear might have been, and I am not going to speak for justice obviously, the fear might have been that a building owner might take a plan to alter his building and break it down into separate sub components over a three-year period and therefore somehow escape some more expensive accessibility requirements that would be required by the path of travel obligations that you find both in ADAAG, the guidelines and the DOJ regulations. And justice again says we are going to take the opportunity to look through that entire three-year period, any floating three-year period during alteration of the building. The international building code does not do that. The new ADA accessibility guidelines that have been proposed at least in the draft form, the current ADA requirements in the international building code says we are going to tell you these specific entrances that have to be accessible. If you have got an entrance that serves a bus stop, it has got to be accessible. If have an entrance that serves a pedestrian walkway, elevated walkway, it is going to be accessible. Then in addition to that, after you have met all of your other requirements, at the very least, 50% of your public entrances are going to be accessible. That is what the ADA says right now. That is what the international building code says right now. The new ADA accessible guide, the ADA/ABA accessibility guideline draft says no, we are going to do that at 50% were going to do that at 60%. That was one thing that the international building codes committee or membership decided not to pick up. Number of wheelchair locations in assembly areas, if you look at the old ADA accessibility guidelines, they require far more wheelchair locations in things like auditoriums and stadiums and arenas than does the 2003 international building code. Quite frankly, this is kind of a hiccup in this harmonization process because the international building code of 2003 uses the proposed ADA numbers, not the old 1991 numbers. So there is a difference there that I think-once the new ADA accessibility requirements for guidelines come out, assuming that they were not changed. Why are some of these differences here? Well, the 60% versus the 50% is just quite honestly a difference of opinion in terms of what the number of accessible entrances should be and that may be resolved in the future. Why does the international building code not say if you are a state or local government building, you have to not get an elevator exception? Well, that was discussed and there were a number of people who proposed doing that, and it was decided, well, we have to draw a line somewhere in this building code because we are not a civil rights piece of legislation or requirements and this is where we are going to draw the line. Excuse me. That might be arbitrary, but they decided to. By and large, they said that based on the department of justice regulations related to Title II facilities, department of justice says a new construction and alterations of Title II buildings, quote, each facility or part of a facility constructed by, on behalf of, or for the use of a public entity shall be designed and constructed to be accessible. Well, that is neat. If the town of, if the city of Chicago is going to build a building, we are going to go out and build our building, it is going to have you know, our name and it will have the mayors name plastered on the front of the construction site, built by the city of Chicago, then there is no question that is a Title II building that is being built by a Title II entity and so therefore it is not entitled to the elevator exception. However, in many instances, what is happening nowadays is that the Title II entity, the state or local government is not in fact building the building, but somebody else, some third party private person is building the building with the understanding that somewhere down the road, it is going to be used by the state or local government entity. This happens quite frequently on the federal level and although federal buildings are not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, I think it gives you an idea of what is happening at the state or local level as well. The city of Buffalo where my office is right now, I am in a 16-story federal office building that was built in 1968 and that building is being vacated within the next year. The replacement buildings that are being built around the periphery of this 16-story building are all being built by private developers who hope to get contracts, long-term leasing relationships with the people in our building. The department of veterans affairs may be in one of the buildings over here and the Social Security administration will be in a building over there and then the Internal Revenue Service will move over into the third building over there. We all know that is going to happen, but at this point in time, that building is not being built by the federal government and if it were the state of New York, it would not be built by the state government or the city of Buffalo government. It is being built by a private developer with the understanding that somewhere down the line, he is probably going to have the government move in and lease his space. Building codes cannot deal with that. They are not equipped to deal with that. You know, I am going to write a building permit based what is going to happen in terms of your leasing this space in the year 2010. It just does not work. So therefore, the international building code writers decided we really cannot write language that regulates buildings that are being built for the use of or on behalf of the state or the city or the town or the village. The other thing to bear in mind, and this is one of the arguments I made in those discussions is that in some ways, more and more the international building code reflects all of the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It has this false illusion of meeting all of your-every conceivable federal regulation related to accessibility and that is not the case. As many of you know or probably most of you know, the architectural barriers act of 1968 says we do not care who you are. If you take one federal dollar and use that to construct a building or alter a building or lease a building, we are going to hold you to certain federal accessibility criteria. Section 504 of the rehabilitation act of 1973 says if you take that dollar, we don not care who you are, if you take that dollar and it is a federal dollar, even if you do not build anything with it, if you use it for programs and services that you provide, then you are recipient of federal funds and you are obligated to meet certain federal accessibility requirements. That gets so overwhelming that there is no way you can translate that into a building code. For example, the University of Notre Dame is not covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act because it is a religious institution. It is covered by a building code, I am assuming in the state of Indiana. However, it is also, has all of these other federal obligations. If you are building a building that is using federal money on Notre Dame campus or if certainly Notre Dame is recipient of federal funds, section 504 of the rehab act you have to meet certain accessibility criteria and rather than just artificially drawing the line and saying let''s bring in some other federal regulations, but not all of them, it still leaves confusion out there. IBC said we are going to strictly stay-stick with-other federal obligations out there that may need to be met because other obligations that are incurred due to financial relationships or using federal dollars to build buildings. What are some of the new IBC''s going to-slide 17 and then I am almost finished here. New IBC and ADA features in 2004 and I kind of just throw this out. Actually that one handout I referred to on wheelchair seating gives you-I did not want to go through this, but it gives you a sense of what we have been talking about, how, how accessibility is moving from what it used to be and how they are harmonizing and actually this is kind of the exception that proves the rule. Assembly seating areas is where it is kind of a leapfrog effect that is occurring between the access board and the ANSI standard committee. Where the 1-the existing ADAAG stuff is not real clear, you know, see all the lawsuits that happened in assembly areas after ADAAG was published. The 1998 ANSI standard was not that much better and then the new ADA accessibility guidelines come out and the proposed ones and they provide a lot of detail in terms of how you provide sight lines over standing spectators, etc. The new ANSI A117 standard of 2003 goes even a step further and says here is the formula you can use to ensure you are going to provide sight lines over standing spectators in, say, a football stadium. I would ask you to look through that and you can see how accessibility has advanced in this particular area. If nothing else you see that the 1998 ANSI standard, that row, or that column has a whole bunch of blanks that both the federal access board and the new ANSI standard have filled in. Having said that, what are some of the new requirements that we are going to see both in the 2004 supplement of the international building codes that references the newest ANSI standard and also in the draft ADA/ABA accessibility guidelines. Requirements for children''s environments, the access board did this a long time ago, relatively a long time ago as part of the ADA accessibility guidelines, but they are not enforced at this time through the department of justice. The international building code is picking up what the federal board did for kids environments. So if I have a water closet in a nursery school, you do not want it at 19 inches high obviously. You want it at a height that is appropriate for not only all children, but particularly children with disabilities. New employee work area exceptions, the international building code requirements in 2000 and the ADA accessibility guidelines were worlds apart in how they treated work areas for employees and what they have done essentially is meet in the middle. ADAAG currently that you have to provide access into an employee work area, essentially get in the door, turn around and be able to exit even though that employee work area is 300 square foot in size. The international building code says we want an accessibility route to every single individual employee work station in that huge space. Both probably were not a good answer to the problem and there is a common solution now where just, what it says is that you get access through the common circulation areas of an employee work area. So you might not get an accessible route to every single work station, but you do get accessible routes through that area. It is not just a matter of what ADAAG says right now. You get to roll in and look around and then roll out again. There is a press box exception there. It is kind of a quirky little thing they both pick up. The access board establishes this. If you are from a rural part of the country, which is where I am from and got high school, often times the press box is this little thing up on stilts out in the middle of your football field, which does not look that far different from a corn field, at least where I live. The ADA currently says that thing has to be accessible because it is a single story building, albeit, it is 20 feet in the air, it is still a single story building and it has to be accessible, there is a press box exception for those types of things now both in the draft ADA requirements and in the international building code. Van parking, currently the 2000 international building code and the ADA accessibility guidelines say that one in every eight accessible parking spaces have to be van accessible. That drops down to 1 in 6. The new assembly area requirements, I mentioned you can look at that comparison that we have provided. Provisions for courts and jails, how do I make an accessible courtroom? Does the witness stand have to be accessible? How about the judge''s bench? Does Martha Stewart get an accessible jail cell should she become disabled? I am being facetious obviously. How do you make an accessible jail cell or holding cell? What is the percentage of accessible cells in a correctional facility? That is all addressed by both of those standards. And last but not least, kind of an esoteric little strange thing, both adopt the new platform or wheelchair lift standard in, for providing accessible routes, and there is still severely restricted in new construction. They are used more frequently in existing construction to provide access, but platform lifts now can-vertical platform lifts can now penetrate floors and inclined platform lifts that heretofore for reasons that we will not get into used to be a violation of both the building code and the ADA guidelines, will now be permitted because incline lifts are no longer required under this new A 18 standard to be operated. Okay. So what do you do? Besides ask me a bunch of questions in between-about two minutes? The what to do is I have taken the advocate''s position on this, I guess. But I think that by serving people with disabilities in an advocacy role, I think it also benefits building owners and designers and developers and state agencies, lots of people, who ultimately want to have as best we can a single document that meets both your federal obligations and your state or local building code requirements when it comes to providing access for people with disabilities. I think the best thing to do would be to adopt the international building codes 2004 supplement. Again, that is going be finalized in May of this year, should probably hit the streets by fall of this year. I would adopt that supplement because it brings the newest ANSI standard accessibility technical requirements into play. That is being contemplated in New York State right now. Next you could do, if you cannot do that, at least adopt the international building code 2003 edition, which Michigan has just done as of February of this year and Pennsylvania is in the process of doing as are a number of other states. If you are to deal with the international building code or you are going to be an I code jurisdiction, do not use the 1991 ADAAG technical requirements in lieu of ANSI, which is what Ohio currently does. If you look at the Ohio building code, it has Chapter 11 just like the international building code, does but then for technical requirements, it kicks you back to the 1991 ADAAG and the reason, again, is that those are so outdate and at least in my opinion do not afford as good access, as good a level of access as does the, the ANSI standard. I will not dare speak for the access board, but I think that they think the same thing because they obviously upgraded the technical requirements of the ADAAG to reflect most of the new requirements in the newest ANSI standards, again that harmonization. Last, but not least, if at all possible, retain the more restrictive requirements of the international building code. Unfortunately, there are some jurisdictions out there who have adopted the international building code and adopted the ANSI standard, but then someone in the state capitol says, oh, Jesus, they are requiring a hell of a lot more elevators in that international building code than the ADA does and I am not sure we have to do that and so they reduce, they go down to the ADA requirements for the elevator exception, which provides for far less access, vertical access in buildings than does the international building code. If you all do that, I will be a real happy person and my members will be real happy people because they end up with more accessible buildings and last, but not least, I think, again, I use this term in when I started out, I think it is a win-win situation for everyone. I think we can provide better access for persons with disabilities. In doing so, we provide, in my opinion, more usable buildings, more user-friendly buildings for virtually everyone. The person who is bringing, bringing a case of Coca-Cola up into the office on the second floor likes that elevator just as much as my boss does who uses a wheelchair. Then, last but not least, building owners and architects and developers, to the extent that we have been able to harmonize these requirements so that instead of having that 15% difference between the ADA requirements versus the building code requirements, United Spinal is going to have one half page cheat sheet at end of all of this and say these are the things they have to know where the international building code is different than the ADA accessibility guidelines, that is a huge benefit to building owners and developers and architects, because they have some assurance that they are very, very close to meeting their federal obligation by simple virtue of getting a building permit from their local code department and building to the code that is the international building code adopted in your state. With that, I will shut up and take some questions.
Thank you. I know it is a huge amount of information and I know we have used up a lot of our time today, but hopefully people have gotten some of their questions answered and we will take a quick here and be able to see if we can get some questions in before our scheduled closure. Are you available to initiate our questions and answer period?
We have a question about accessible routes to and from a, like a new state building from a bus stop. What about circulation routes? Is there anything in the new codes to deal with that?
Both ADA accessible guidelines and the building code, are treated in the same manner. One of the problems is that both regulate what happens on the site. So if this new state building is on a site, the bus stop is on the site of the state building
No, it is about a mile away.
Okay. The problem is that neither can regulate that, that dead space or that blank space that exists between that little bus stop pad and the property on which that state building exist also.
So there are not any circulation requirements?
No, not really. You know, if my, if my bus authority in my city has a bus stop here, then four blocks away, there a office building, and the rest of the circulation path is regulated by the city because it is a city right of way, neither the ADA or the building code can regulate what the city does with its property just because the county decided to build an office building a block away from the bus stop.
I was just wondering, what is the-are there any standards for grandfathering in old facilities that are currently used by, or leased by the state of Illinois using federal funds for the work force investment act? It is basically a federal job training program. A lot of these buildings are pretty old, so they are not ADA or section 188 compliant. I am just wondering, are there grandfathering clauses in some of these buildings for these leases? Some of I believe the state may have to just, maybe not renew the lease if they are considering that some of them are not compliant at all. Just checking to see.
Yeah, that is an excellent question. Generally neither the ADA or the-the ADA accessibility guidelines or the building code do not impose requirements on preexisting non-conforming buildings that you are not otherwise altering. If you are going in and altering, sure, both of those documents are going to say you have to provide some level of access. The building code falls totally out of the picture in your case. As a state program or activity, Title II of the ADA, as well as Section 504 of the rehab act is going to require you to ensure that your programs or activities are accessible and do not discriminate on the basis of disability. That becomes real problematic because, as you said, it is not a new building needing the new construction requirements. You will have to go in and make determinations, well, is there an essential program that is occurring on a second floor that is not served by an elevator? If so, have I to either move that program or if I cannot do that, I have to install an elevator, or as you suggested, maybe not renew that lease and find a different building. There is no building out there that is going to meet the new requirements under ADAAG or the building code, so you have got to make a lot of subjective judgment calls. This has an elevator, but it is a real small elevator, can it be used by someone in a wheelchair? Those kinds of judgment calls are tough to make but they are meant to benefit the state because you cannot go in and, you know, put in a brand new elevator every time the regulations change.
So as a side note on there, because you are using WIA funds and you have got section 188 of the WIA non-discrimination requirements that would have to be you would also have a very strong argument because this is a program funded through those funds. Again, it does not have a specific building code attached to it but does talk that you have the accessibility to and usable by people with disabilities. So you still have to go back in and assess those buildings and as they would renew leases or as they would conduct programs currently, they going to have to do proactive review of the facilities and remove barriers that they are able to remove.
That is no different than what virtually every Title II entity out there has had to do. I cut my teeth at Michigan State University doing this stuff in the ''70''s. Michigan state is a typical big 10 university and it is huge. It has got literally hundreds of buildings, many of which were over 100 years old and, or at least some of them were over 100 years old and there is no, quote, grandfather thing. Well, you do not have to provide access because it is an old building, you just have to ensure that the programs and activities that are being provided by the university are accessible.
We adopted by state statute previously the 2000 IBC along with the 2001 supplement. And there is a bill in our, in front of our legislature right now to update that and I am afraid we may have a problem here. As I said, the previous one the 2000 IBC and the 2001 supplement. This new bill adopts the 2003 IBC and appendices there to pertaining to building accessibility.
That generally is a good thing. Very briefly, and by the way, give me a call if you want to. I mean I can help work out the details on this off line. But the appendices in the international building code that are related to accessibility are referred to as, quote, non-code issues. They are things like building room signs, telephones, Automated Teller Machine (ATM) machines, things that traditionally are not regulated by a building code because the code enforcement official does not see it on the building plans and therefore cannot sign off yes or no. It was a political decision to-the appendices attempts to replicate of the requirements of the, of new ADAAG that are not found in Chapter 11 of the building code. So if Idaho says we want to adopt 2003 and the appendix, appendix E of 2003, you are going to get better access because Idaho has made the political decision that in your state, our code enforcement officials are going to be responsible for insuring that telephones are at a maximum 48 inches high and TTY''s are provided for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing and all those other non-code things that are not in the Chapter 11.
Yeah. I am just afraid that we have made a mistake by not referencing the 2004 supplement
New York made that decision because, quite frankly, New York state is in the process of adopting the 2003 IBC as well. And a number of the folks in the disability community said we know what New York is like and that by the time you actually get around to doing this, now, this is not done through regulations, not through legislation, so there is a bit of a difference there, but by the time you actually get around to doing this, the 2004 supplement is going to be printed and available, so what we are actually saying we know what the requirements of the 2004 supplement are going to say or we have a real good idea because we are part of that process, why don''t you just adopt those as amendments to the 2003 IBC. So they are not formally adopting the 2004 supplement, but for purposes of accessibility, they might as well get it.
We are going to be doing a year-long compliance survey featuring four areas in Pitt county, North Carolina, one being education from universities, community colleges, public schools, private schools. We are doing medical facilities because we have a medical school here and large area hospital, retail and then we are going to be doing governmental office buildings, being city, county, state and federal and what I was wondering is, is there available for use a condensed version of the IBC or something that we could use rather than be, than the entire code written out?
Wow. Well, you know what you are going to be doing through your retirement years, don''t you? The simple answer is no. Now, if you want to know-the international building code, the 2003 that I am looking at, about one and three quarters inches thick, for your purposes, Chapter 11, which is the accessibility requirements, that plus a couple of other things in there would probably be more like 12 or 15 pages. To my knowledge, you could I don''t think the International Code Council (ICC) has anything like this planned, but previously there has been like checklists developed for like the uniform federal access standards. I am not a real strong fan of checklists because you get one section on doors and then you walk into a building with 300 doors, which means are you going to fill that form out 300 times or what? But certainly you could take a look at those 12-15 pages of the 2003 IBC and kind of generate a question/answer format from those.
Do I understand you correctly that the 2003 IBC is more, restrictive than the ADAAG?
No, there is going to be instances in which the new ADAAG is more restrictive than the new IBC. Again, things like requiring 60% of the entrances to be accessible as opposed to 50%. In my opinion, and, my bias, I am a very strong proponent of the international building code and as an organization that represents people in wheelchairs, I think the answer generally is yes only because you get far more elevators under the international building code than you do under the Americans with Disabilities. For that reason alone, I would say, you know, I think the benefit is greater under the IBC.
Federal access board people on line, they are probably yelling at me even as I speak.
Yeah, well, we all have our opinions take it from there. At this point, unfortunately, we are at about 27 after the hour and we will need to wrap up as we have people are scheduled to go places and things, but I do appreciate. You gave a whole lot of information and I am sure we had many, many people who wanted to ask additional questions. They do have the contact information you provided us on the power point presentation and as well as on the resource information that was provided so that if there was additional questions people could definitely follow up with you directly. In addition, I would recommend that individuals contact their disability and business technical assistance centers for further clarification and information and that can be done at 800-949-4232, both voice and TTY. We have several sessions coming up in the rest of the year. The only other session, I would just like to highlight for those on the phone call that might be interested is that we are scheduling a special session that is not currently on the calendar, but that will be in August and it will be related to the new ADA accessibility guidelines release, which are anticipated about-to be released sometime in the summer potentially in connection with the anniversary of the ADA in July. And so we will be following up with a session shortly thereafter in the second week of August to give people an opportunity to get some firsthand information from the staff of the access board about what those look like and get some clarification of those in that session. We also have a session in September of 2004 which is related to conducting a self assessment of your facilities for accessibility and what are the pros and cons of doing those types of assessments which might be helpful to people who might be doing something where they trying to look at checklists and we will give you pros and considerations of those in that particular session. So those are things to keep in mind and you can access the schedule for the sessions on our website at www.adagreatlakes.org or by contacting your regional disability and business technical assistance center directly. Our April session is scheduled for April 20th of 2004, is titled leave as an accommodation, how do you determine if it is reasonable? Our speaker will be Adele Rapport who is an attorney from the equal employment opportunity commission, so I invite you to invite someone to that session as well. Unfortunately we are at the time of the session today where we have to say good-bye. I hope people got some information on this very important topic and one that also can be very confusing. I would thank Brian today and the United Spinal Association for their time and efforts in putting this presentation together for us today and assisting us in reaching out to individuals on this topic. I would
Thanks for having us.
I would just remind you that the transcript will be posted within the next 5 days on our website, which will be an edited transcript of the session as well as the digital recording so that if you missed something or would like to refer back to something, come back to our website at www.adagreatlakes.org and click on the transcripts and you will be able to access that information as well. So thank you one and all for your participation today and, Brian, any last minute comments you would like to make before we close?
Just I apologize for going over and I hope everyone makes me pay for it by giving me a call tomorrow in the eastern time zone and I will answer your questions then.
Great. Well, thank you much. There is your penance. Take care, everyone-everybody and we will close the session.