HIGHLAND — After years of insufficient access for the disabled, Highland officials said Wednesday City Hall will be brought into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 within 30 days.

City Council members unanimously approved a $10,904 contract Tuesday night that will add an intercom system to the outside of City Hall and update some of the building's door handles.

"If someone wants to come in, they can push a buzzer and we can go out and help them come in," said Highland city administrator Barry Edwards.

Edwards said Highland negotiated the updates with the Disability Law Center, an advocacy group that recently filed a federal lawsuit against the city for not complying with ADA standards.

"I turned it over to the architect and said, 'Do it,' but it's my fault because I didn't follow through with it," Edwards said.

Edwards said the city has been working on updating the building, but different projects interrupted progress. At one time, the city considered remodeling as a step in making the building ADA-compliant. When bids for remodeling the building were too high, the City Council instead decided to build a new city hall.

But plans for building a fire station and new city hall inadvertently bumped updating the current city hall to the back burner, Edwards said.

"We really have been moving in the right direction," Edwards said. "We just weren't moving fast enough."

Although Highland's current City Hall does have a ramp, the two-story building does not have an elevator to travel between levels. According to Keith Barney, a former Paralympic athlete who complained during a recent city meeting about the building's access, the ramp is too steep and dangerous to navigate.

"You can ignore me, but you can't ignore a federal law," Barney said. "We as private citizens don't get to use excuses; neither should they as a government entity. That's the way it works."

The ADA was implemented in 1990 as a way to prevent discrimination of disabled individuals. According to the ADA, society has "tended to isolate and segregate individuals with disabilities, and, despite some improvements, such forms of discrimination ... continue to be a serious and pervasive social problem."

The ADA also says a failure to make "modifications to existing facilities" is a part of discrimination.

Barney said he felt discriminated against when he came to Highland's City Hall to pay a traffic ticket in 2003. When he found how difficult it was to enter the building, Barney said he wrote a letter to the City Council and complained.

Until the recent lawsuit, Barney said nothing has happened with his complaint.

Edwards said he doesn't expect the lawsuit to dissipate with the building's improvements. The new city hall, which is still in planning stages, will be in complete compliance with ADA standards, Edwards said.

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