Officials in Pulaski County are taking steps to improve handicap accessibility at the courthouse. Maintenance supervisor Jeff Johnston told the county commissioners Tuesday morning he can reconfigure both the men’s and women’s restrooms in the basement by removing a stall in each one. Doing so will accommodate wheelchair-width stalls. However, the entry doors to the restrooms are still not wide enough to provide accessible entry. Johnston says the men’s room will need to be redesigned since the door is part of a load-bearing wall, but the women’s room door can be widened.
“I’d like to go in there, pull those stalls out, rearrange the bathrooms, and then I’d like to continue on with a kind of sprucing up the bathrooms, the whole hallway, everything downstairs with white trim,” Johnston told the commissioners.
“That will give it a little cleaner look and will make it look a lot nicer. The wood paneling that’s down there now, we’ll fill it all in and sand it all down and make it look really nice and then replace the broken tiles, put up trim and that sort of thing.”
Johnston also wants to upgrade the nine light fixtures in the courthouse basement with LED lights that are drop-ins for fixtures. He says they are the size of a fixture but do not have bulbs. They last more than 12 years and use three times less energy than an LED bulb, which should result in considerable long-term savings.
Johnston adds he can do all of the work himself with money that’s been allocated in his budget and have everything but the restroom door modifications done in a few weeks. The commissioners unanimously agreed to let him get started.
The restroom upgrades are among the changes necessary to bring the Pulaski County Courthouse into compliance with the federal Americans With Disabilities Act. A federal class action lawsuit was recently filed against the county due to accessibility concerns. It’s pending in South Bend.
