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Prepared Remarks of Olegario D.
Cantos VII, Esq.
Special Counsel to the Acting Assistant Attorney General
Civil Rights Division U.S. Department of Justice
Disability and
Special Needs Technical Assistance Conference:
Emergency Preparedness,
Response, and Recovery
National Organization on Disability
Tuesday,
January 8, 2008
Capital Hilton, Washington, DC
Good morning,
everyone. I wish to begin by extending to you warmest greetings on behalf of
Acting Assistant Attorney General Grace Chung Becker. At the Department of
Justice, we in the Civil Rights Division believe very strongly in the need for
collaboration in order to prevent reinvention of the proverbial wheel to save
on precious time and minimize waste of tax dollars. A good government is a
responsive one, and emergency preparedness is an issue that affects us all.
In late July 2004, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order
13347, addressing emergency preparedness concerning people with disabilities.
Consequently, agencies across the federal government have combined their
efforts to share information, exchange ideas, and determine ways in which to
work closely with local and state officials within the emergency preparedness
field as well as anyone else (including leaders and members of communities of
every size) playing an active role to prepare for the event of a natural or
human-caused disaster.
Philosophically, the President believes that all
Americans - both those with and without disabilities - must be considered in
emergency planning, and must also be a part of community-based solutions that
take the needs of various constituencies into careful and meaningful
consideration. Within the disability context, it is important to gain a basic
understanding of the laws that govern how emergency planning professionals and
all other segments of the community should include people with disabilities in
the planning process and respond to their needs to the same degree of
effectiveness as for those without disabilities. Ultimately, everyone must
remember that the worst time to address these issues is when an emergency has
already happened. We should all prepare in advance.
THE SCOPE OF THE
LAW Going into some detail regarding what federal laws apply to protect the
rights of people with disabilities in emergency preparedness situations, Title
II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires nondiscrimination in
State and local government programs, services, and activities. Everything a
state or local government does is covered. The Department of Justice has
extensive title II regulations that cover all programs, services, or activities
of public entities. These public entities cannot exclude individuals on the
basis of disability and must make programs in existing facilities accessible,
including shelters. Public entities must make new facilities accessible in
accordance with a higher architectural design standard.
Title III
applies to places of public accommodation. Most common examples include bars,
restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters, and hotels. Other examples include
private entities who are service providers, such as doctor's offices and
nonprofit relief organizations. If a city contracts with the Red Cross or
another private service provider, the city remains subject to title II, and the
other private entity would have independent Title III obligations.
On
another front, recipients of federal financial assistance are subject to
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Section 504 is enforced by each
federal agency that provides Federal financial assistance and covers entities
that receive such assistance to provide programs for emergency services. These
include fire departments, police departments, and private nonprofit
organizations. The scope of the requirements here are the same as Title II of
the ADA.
It is worth noting that Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act
also applies to the activities of the Federal Government itself. Section 504
applies to the federally conducted activities of Federal Executive agencies,
such as, for example, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Park
Service, and the Social Security Administration. Under the Rehabilitation Act,
federal agencies have an obligation to provide reasonable accommodations to
employees with disabilities, including an obligation to accommodate employees
with disabilities in evacuation procedures, sheltering, etc.
Employment
outside the Federal sector is covered by title I of the ADA. Title I covers
private employers and State and local governments with 15 or more employees. It
also requires reasonable accommodation, including an obligation to accommodate
employees with disabilities in evacuations, sheltering, and other facets of
emergency planning and implementation of related plans. Section 504 imposes
similar requirements on employers that receive Federal funds.
PROJECT
CIVIC ACCESS
I would like to tell you about Project Civic Access, a
nationwide effort by the Department of Justice to ensure that towns themselves
are accessible to people with disabilities. The main focus has been on town
halls and city facilities, such as parks, sidewalks, and websites. We have
entered into over 150 settlement agreements with local governments across the
country.
Since 9/11, our focus has broadened also to include
accessibility in emergency preparedness and planning for people with
disabilities. A number of agreements now include emergency preparedness
provisions. All Project Civic Access agreements may be found on our website at
http://www.ada.gov. There are a number of important issues to consider, and
these have also been addressed in our PCA agreements.
KEY TIPS TO
ENHANCING ACCESSIBILITY
If you keep the following key points in mind,
you will take substantial steps forward on meeting the needs of people with
disabilities within emergency preparedness situations.
1. In the area of
contracting, if a city contracts with another entity, public or private (like
the Red Cross, for example), the city still has an obligation to ensure that
programs are accessible. As mentioned earlier, these other entities may have
independent obligations under the ADA or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
2. With regard to planning, people with disabilities and organizations that
represent them should be involved in the planning process for emergency
preparedness, and their views should be solicited on a regular basis.
3. In
terms of notification, public entities must ensure that emergency management
policies and procedures address the needs of people with disabilities. For
instance, where a city warns citizens of an emergency by sirens or other
audible alerts such as police cruiser bullhorns, it is likely that people who
are deaf or hard of hearing will be excluded to a significant degree. To
address this issue, some cities are developing systems using phone calls,
auto-dialed TTY messages, and e-mails to pre-registered individuals. Other
methods include providing real-time open captioning on television programming
or dispatching sign language interpreters to television studios to assist in
broadcasting important emergency-related news information.
4. With
evacuations, public entities must establish evacuation procedures to
accommodate people with disabilities, including those who use wheelchairs or
other mobility devices, those who are blind or who have low vision, and those
who have cognitive disabilities, and enable them to safely evacuate under
trying conditions. Some communities are establishing voluntary, confidential
registries of individuals who may need assistance. It is critical to establish
procedures that ensure voluntariness and confidentiality, that provide a
process for continually updating the registry, and that promote the widest
possible awareness and participation.
5. Regarding emergency shelters, they
historically have been supplied with the basic necessities of food, water, and
blankets. Now they must adopt a more sophisticated and comprehensive approach
to ensure accessibility to people with disabilities.
6. Turning to the
accessibility of buildings, these facilities must provide an accessible route
to an accessible entrance and accessible restrooms. If they have phones, TTY's
should be provided. If not all shelters are physically accessible, let the
community know which ones are. It is important to survey existing shelters and
make them more accessible, both within a physical and programmatic sense.
7. There is the important policy question concerning service animals. A
shelter cannot turn away someone who comes with a service animal because of a
"no pets" rule. Adjustments may need to be made within the shelter for those
who for health or safety reasons cannot be near them.
8. The particular
medical needs of people with disabilities must be addressed. Emergency
officials must consider the needs of individuals who use electricity to power
life-sustaining devices or who use medication that require refrigeration. There
should be at least one shelter with a backup generator. Even though a city may
have a "special needs" shelter with a wide range of specialized services, most
people with disabilities do not require these services and should not be turned
away from their neighborhood shelter or segregated in particular shelters or
parts of shelters.
9. With respect to post-evacuation or temporary housing,
if a city provides temporary housing for victims of disasters, it should
include accessible units within the range of choices offered (e.g., hotels with
accessible rooms.)
NEW TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE DOCUMENT
These tips
that I have just given you should serve merely as the starting point. To help
you with learning more, I am pleased to inform you that the Civil Rights
Division recently released Chapter 7 of the ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for
State and Local Government, an important resource for communities that are in
the process of planning for accessibility. It is available on our website at
http://www.ada.gov. Dov Lutzker, a long-time disability rights attorney in our
Division who was just named Special Counsel in the Disability Rights Section,
will provide you with further background about this material, following my
remarks.
NEXT STEPS AND REACHING OUT TO THE DISABILITY
COMMUNITY
For those new to working with people with disabilities, there
may be questions regarding how to identify key leaders in your area who can
provide qualified and invaluable perspective and expertise. In determining how
to move ahead, it is critical to understand that people with disabilities come
in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Representing one in six Americans, they are
of any age and come from every socio-economic classification. In short,
disability can touch all of us. As is the common saying in the disability
world, ours is the only minority one can join.
Sometimes, people
possess disabilities such as mine (being blind and using a long white cane).
But, in many other cases, the disabilities themselves may not be visible at all
such as for those who have psychiatric disabilities, learning disabilities, or
invisible medical conditions such as epilepsy. For those with invisible
disabilities, all too often, people tend either to say or think, "Gosh, you
don't LOOK disabled." Just please keep in mind that there is often more to life
than meets the eye. Leaders in the disability community stand ready to provide
information that will prove extremely valuable to you as you move forward to
address the diverse needs of different populations, and remember that there is
no such thing as a "one size fits all" approach. To get you started, here are
some networking resources that you may begin to use right away:
* There
are more than 500 organizations called "independent living centers" that assist
people with disabilities in maximizing their potential. An extensive directory
of these organizations may be found on the website of the Independent Living
Resources Utilization Project at http://www.ilru.org. From the home page,
simply click on "CIL Directory" and select your state, and you will instantly
be linked to the names, executive directors, addresses, phone numbers, fax
numbers, and email addresses of key contacts.
* To network with those
serving people with developmental disabilities such as cerebral palsy and
cognitive disabilities, you may learn about your state's developmental
disabilities council by going to the website of the National Association of
Councils on Developmental Disability at http://www.nacdd.org.
* To tap
into the network of federally-funded legal advocacy organizations including
those serving individuals with physical, psychiatric, and learning
disabilities, the National Disability Rights Network has an online directory
which you may use to identify those in the legal profession, whose life's work
surrounds advocating for the rights of people with disabilities under the law.
To learn more and to view the complete directory by state, visit
http://www.ndrn.org.
* The National Organization on Disability has been
working to assemble information surrounding various facets of emergency
preparedness for people with disabilities. For full details, visit
http://www.nod.org.
* Another organization doing some groundbreaking
work on assembling information that you may readily view is the American
Association on Health and Disability (AAHD). The organization has put together
and is continually updating an annotated bibliography, which has very useful
information. Visit http://www.aahd.us.
* If you wish to network with
any or all of the more than 650,000 nonprofit organizations in this country,
there is a one-stop source of information that can help you do just that. Visit
http://www.guidestar.org. While there, if you yourself are with a nonprofit
organization, utilize the opportunity to view your own organization's full
listing, which includes mission statement, three most recent accomplishments,
contact information, website URL, names of current board members, and even a
page to allow folks to donate money to the organization online via a major
credit card. Check it out.
* If you are affiliated with a nonprofit
organization and would like to identify foundation resources that may assist
you with your ongoing work, visit http://www.FoundationCenter.org. The
Foundation Center has put together a list of more than 70,000 resources, and
you may also take online courses on grant-writing and may find a number of
invaluable strategies to assist you with building upon the work you already do.
Again, in all your work, remember meaningfully to include qualified people with
disabilities.
* What better way to maximize your productivity in
development of effective and innovative approaches to emergency preparedness
for people with disabilities than by learning from the work that has already
been done by others? Toward this end, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,
through its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties headed by Director
Daniel W. Sutherland, has established a centralized site that brings together
hundreds of informational resources in the field. Visit and contribute to the
content of http://www.DisabilityPreparedness.gov, and see what happens when you
learn from the examples set by government agencies, non-profit organizations,
private sector businesses, and others. (DOJ's Civil Rights Division is proud to
have worked in close collaboration with almost two dozen agencies to assemble
the site's content.) For additional tools and resources, also see
http://www.DisabilityInfo.gov, which particularly features (among other things)
disability preparedness and the workplace with coordination by the U.S.
Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy.
*
Finally, last but certainly not least, I want to repeat the official disability
rights website of the Department of Justice, which is devoted specifically to
providing information to people with disabilities and their families about
their rights and responsibilities under the law. As you have seen, the website
URL is both easy to remember and easy to pass along. It is http://www.ada.gov.
Visit today, and visit often. The website is updated regularly, so it would do
you well to bookmark it on your desktop.
CONCLUSION
Now, my
friends, you are armed. I have given you the basics surrounding emergency
preparedness and people with disabilities, and I have provided you with various
ways to reach out to leaders and members of the disability community. As
leaders in the emergency preparedness field in this state, the next steps are
up to you. I respectfully urge you not to think of people with disabilities as
an afterthought but rather to involve us in every facet of what you do. We want
to contribute, and we are eager to help. We believe very strongly in the value
of self-determination, and one important area in which this is so critical is
emergency preparedness. "Nothing about us without us."
In looking at
where we are, the process of planning for accessibility in emergency
preparedness is in its infancy. We have much to learn and to accomplish. It is
vital to include people with disabilities at all stages of this
process.
It will be important for us to share innovative practices and
to learn from experience. We have already learned much from responses to
earthquakes, rolling blackouts, and wildfires in California; tornadoes in
Kansas; and hurricanes in Florida. Let us individually and collectively take
our work to the next level.
We in the Department of Justice are already
working actively with the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies on
the Interagency Coordinating Council on Emergency Preparedness and Individuals
with Disabilities. We look forward to being a resource as we strive to
centralize emergency preparedness information that is both user-friendly and
pertinent to the work of various stakeholders including disability
organizations, emergency preparedness professionals, social service agencies,
government entities, first responders, private sector businesses, and
others.
Working together, we can make America a more secure and safe
place for all of its people, including people with disabilities. Let's get it
done!
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NYS Independent Living Council, Inc.