On Friday, Michael Ring, vice president of New York-based disability activist group Disabled In Action (DIA), said he “yelled at the government.”
He joined a group of frustrated disabled advocates fighting for their right to remain a part of society, even when it’s snowing, at the oversight hearing on Pedestrian and Transit Accessibility During Winter Weather Events in New York City Hall’s Council Chambers.
“A wheelchair user or someone using a mobility device needs the confidence to know that everything is clear and everything has 4 feet of width because if you get halfway to where you want to go and then the curb is not cleared of snow,” Ring said. “You’re stuck.”
New York City was blanketed with back-to-back snow storms since the start of the year, recording historic low freezing temperatures for extended periods of time, giving Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his administration one of their biggest challenges– TIMELY SNOW REMOVAL.
For the latest winter blast, the Department of Sanitation deployed 2,600 workers, 700 salt-spreaders, 2,200 plows and 1,500 emergency snow shovelers into service, according to acting commissioner Javier Lojan’s opening statement.
Commissioner Mike Flynn of the Department of Transportation said they worked with JCDecaux to clear both inside the bus shelter, the three-foot zone around the edge and then create the path to the roadway at 3,400 bus stops after two days, half as much time as the first snow blast to maintain accessibility.
Although cleanup operations significantly improved during the February blizzard compared to the January storm, Mamdani’s requirement that property owners carve out a four-foot-wide sidewalk path big enough for wheelchairs was not enough for disabled New Yorkers to freely and safely get back out.
DSNY issued a combined 5,100 summonses to property owners for not clearing sidewalks, fire hydrants, unsheltered bus stops and crosswalks following both unprecedented snowstorms. “That might be necessary in certain situations where there’s certain chronic property owners [who are] unresponsive,” Lojan said.
But fines are not the solution, advocates say. “We need to have a better system to correctly shovel out bus stops and curb cuts. It should not be the property owner. 311 takes complaints and gets money and fines, but the snow and ice are still there and we are still stranded,” Jean Ryan, the head of DIA, testified about her lived experience as a motorized wheelchair user. “We need access now.”
Lojan adamantly stood his ground on the claim that it is not his department or his responsibility to shovel sidewalks and curb cuts.
Still, New York City Council Majority Leader Shaun Abreu asked the department to do a better job at reminding and notifying property owners of their obligations well ahead of time, as cleaning responsibilities may not have stayed with them.
Also on this day, Councilmember Shahana Hanif celebrated the inception of the newly created Committee on Disabilities, with her leading the pack as chair at its very first hearing. “Accessibility is not a luxury. It is infrastructure, dignity, and survival. Disabled New Yorkers are the largest minority in our city. Yet, their needs are too often treated as secondary. This committee exists to change that,” Hanif said.
Nobody was smiling because some remained homebound.
The hearing, originally set for Feb. 23, only saw two wheelchair users, one rollator walker and someone with an ankle foot brace in person. Others were virtually present as snow and ice continued to be in their way.
“For every empty seat in this room, there is a disabled New Yorker with a story to tell, but an inability to tell it,” Jonathan Hannon, whose mobility is limited by genetic disorders known as Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, said in his testimony.
“It’s terrible that you would want to hold the hearing about us without us. Where is the justice in that?” Ryan added, criticizing the council’s decision to not postpone again. “Today you are putting the dis to disability civil rights.”
While many saw it as ineffective and pointless, Hannon was one of the truly concerned disabled advocates who decided to file a 311 complaint for DSNY’s mismanagement of the situation for not properly cleaning curb cuts, crosswalks, and bus stops, he said.
“These are the responsibility of the Department of Sanitation. However, 311 seems to follow the instructions told to them by sanitation despite the fact that that isn’t what the law says. And because of this, innocent New Yorkers are being ticketed for something that isn’t their responsibility, while sanitation shirks this responsibility to assist disabled New Yorkers,” Hannon shot.
New York City Administrative Code section 16-123 and 124 details that the responsibilities does in fact fall on both parties— “Whenever any owner, lessee, tenant, occupant, or other person having charge of any building or lot of ground, abutting upon any street or public place where the sidewalk is paved, shall fail to comply with the provisions of this section, the commissioner, immediately after every snowfall or the formation of ice on the streets, shall forthwith cause the removal of the same, and shall keep all streets clean and free from obstruction,” the statute reads.
As a result of not being able to get out of her house for six weeks, Ryan noted that she has had to incur more financial costs for groceries.
“I need some peppers and zucchini, but I can’t get to the grocery store. So, I’ll just have to go into my freezer and see what I cooked before,” she said. “I get the things I wanted because somebody else is doing the shopping when you order online but they don’t always know what you really want or it’s not available or they can’t find it so, I only got some of them and there’s a minimum too. So you have to spend more and get more stuff that you may not need.”
Last month Able News got the scoop on the new commissioner for the Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities, but general counsel Emily Sweet represented the office at the hearing. When questioned by Committee Chair Hanif about the role MOPD played in assisting people with disabilities during the storms, the Deputy Commissioner found herself cornered with no concrete answers to give.
Able was surprised to learn that Nisha Agarwal’s first day on the job as commissioner of MOPD is TODAY, March 2nd!
Evan Yankey, advocacy director of Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled, came to the rescue at the final minutes to say that MOPD was reaching out to disability advocacy groups about concerns raised and redirected them to independent living centers because the office itself doesn’t have enough funding or staffing to handle the problems needed from the community.
“MOPD does a lot of work trying to interact with other agencies to get things solved. They were not able to get a lot of things solved through 311,” he said. “It is our organization’s position that MOPD can do a lot more here if they had more staff, if they had more money, and if they had more ability to interact with all the different agencies.”