Access To Ferry Courthouse Limited For Disabled County Budget Has No Funding For An Elevator

Curlew resident Dale Frank didn’t give the Ferry County Courthouse much thought before he dived into a shallow portion of the Kettle River in 1991 and broke his neck.

But using a wheelchair gave Frank, 43, a new perspective on the 1936-vintage courthouse, which has a well-marked handicapped parking space out front but no way for disabled people to get inside.

At the front door, stairs go up to the two main floors or down to a daylight basement.

“Anybody who’s disabled or handicapped, there’s no way for them to get up those stairs,” Frank said. “They have no ramp, no elevator, no nothing for them.”

The basement has wheelchair access, through a back door, but Prosecutor Steve Graham’s office and restrooms are about the only public facilities on that floor.

There is no way for Frank to get to the courtroom where a civil dispute he’s involved in should be handled. Or to the treasurer’s office where he might pay his taxes. Or to the commissioners’ office where he might register his complaint about the building’s lack of an elevator.

Ferry County commissioners say they would like to install an elevator, but lean budgets have made it difficult to provide even basic services.

“This stuff bothers us but when you’re so broke you’ve got to look up to see bottom, what do you do?” said Jim Hall, chairman of the County Commission.

When Frank went through a divorce in 1994, court proceedings were moved to a tiny room in the basement.

“It didn’t feel too good,” Frank said. “Being down there is like they’re hiding you.”

Other people with disabilities can’t be accommodated even that well.

Republic attorney Norman Sauer, who served five years as county prosecutor and six years as District Court judge, now mostly uses a wheelchair because of a stroke. He has to get to the courtroom and the clerk’s office to continue his private law practice.

His wife, Irene, helps him up the two flights of stairs, and he uses a cane in the courtroom.

“It’s pretty difficult because I, myself, had open-heart surgery,” Irene Sauer said. “It’s just been getting too hard for me to get him up there.”

Because of that, Norman Sauer said, he has to limit his practice. “It would be very helpful to have an elevator to get up there,” he said.

Spokane County Superior Court Judge Greg Sypolt, who can’t use his legs and walks with arm crutches, also has negotiated the stairs several times to serve as a visiting judge.

“He managed fine, but it couldn’t have been easy,” said Gloria Perchynski, the Ferry County Superior Court clerk.

Sypolt declined to comment because of the possibility someone might litigate the issue, but Ferry County Superior Court Judge Rebecca Baker sees an administrative problem she must address.

“It is a major problem to be disabled in Ferry County in the first place, but it really is not fair to expect people to just forgo being on jury duty or having the benefit of a cross-section of people on a jury panel,” Baker said.

Strokes, heart attacks, bad knees and use of oxygen tanks all are reasons people have given for being excused from jury duty, Baker said.

She and Perchynski said they’ve pressed commissioners for an elevator in the past, and they were optimistic when a preliminary architectural study was done six to eight years ago. But political resolve faded along with the county budget, and county officials continue to get by as best they can.

In Frank’s civil dispute, that means moving a pending hearing to the nearby Kiwanis Hall. His Columbia Legal Services attorneys have asked the U.S. attorney’s office in Spokane to file an Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit on Frank’s behalf.

“It just isn’t fair for this man to have to sit on the sidelines while his legal life swirls around him,” said Nancy Isserlis, Spokane regional director of the statewide legal assistance program.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Pam DeRusha said the law allows “reasonable accommodations” such as moving court to an accessible building.

Moving to the Kiwanis Hall may be legal, but it doesn’t seem right, Frank said.

Hall, chairman of the county commission, agrees.

“We’re legal, but we don’t like the fact that they have to go downstairs to hold court,” he said.

Hall said commissioners are working on a solution.

For starters, he said commissioners voted late last year to remove restrictions that prevented use of the county’s $277,659 capital improvement fund for projects inside the city of Republic, where the courthouse is located.

In the past, the fund has been limited to projects in unincorporated portions of the county. The money comes from a stateauthorized 0.25 percent real estate sales tax.

Hall said he and Commissioners Gary Kohler and Dennis Snook thought the restriction was established by the state, but it turned out to have been imposed by previous commissioners.

“We’ve got a guy looking for grants and, if we could find one, we could put up a pretty good match,” Hall said.

Making the courthouse handicapped-accessible is No. 16 on a list of 17 economic-development projects commissioners approved in December, but Hall said many of the other projects have more immediate prospects for funding.

“If we knew there was funding, we’d move (the courthouse project) up in a hurry,” he said.

Hall said installation of an elevator might be combined with construction of a second-story passageway from the jail next door. County officials worry about the current practice of escorting prisoners through the heart of the courthouse to get them to court.

Okanogan County’s historic courthouse was equally inaccessible until last spring, when commissioners spent $133,016 to install a three-story elevator.

A survey by the Washington State Bar Association and the state Access to Justice Board found seven other courtrooms with varying degrees of inaccessibility. It isn’t clear whether any of them are as inaccessible as Ferry County’s.

One thing is clear, though: Few counties struggle as much financially as sparsely populated Ferry County.

Baker said Initiative 695 was primarily responsible for a 20 percent budget cut in Ferry County this year, compared with 10 percent in Pend Oreille County and less than that in Stevens County - the three counties she and Judge Larry Kristianson serve.

Ferry County eliminated 10-1/2 of 50 current-expense account jobs and closed most offices to the public on Fridays so the remaining workers can catch up on their paperwork.

“Our biggest problem is the (Echo Bay gold) mine, which is just barely here anymore,” Perchynski said. “When that goes and they shut down our logging totally, what will we have?”

Although she wants commissioners to make the elevator a higher priority, she understands their emphasis on projects most likely to bring jobs to the county.

“We have a hospital that is hanging by a thread,” Perchynski said. “We have a school district that’s the same, and an ambulance service. There are so many things that are in need, it’s hard for a courthouse elevator to compete.”