A view of Albany City Hall.
Starting now, city permits to “restripe” a parking lot in Albany will cost a less in most cases. Reacting to business complaints, the city council Wednesday passed a resolution lowering the price of a restriping permit to $75 for parking lots with up to five spaces designated for the disabled — so-called accessible spaces. The previous fees had ranged upward of $300 per lot, depending on size, which was said in some cases to exceed the cost of painting the stripes.
The state building code requires at least one accessible space in even the smallest lots, the council was told. Accessible spaces must be configured a certain way so that disabled people, especially people in wheelchairs, can use them. When a parking lot is built and striped the first time, the layout is covered by the building permit. Not all cities require a permit for restriping those lots later on. Albany does because, in the words of City Manager Wes Hare, it has a responsibility under the federal Americans with Disability Act (ADA) to administer federal accessibility requirements. He said the city also wants to do more than pay mere lip service to meeting the needs of disabled people when they frequent local stores.
For larger parking lots, so big they are required to have six or more accessible spaces, the new restriping permit fee is $75 plus $70 an hour for inspections, with a minimum of three hours. A city building inspector recently spent almost a whole day on problems at a large store’s parking lot that had been restriped wrong, the council was told, but the store was not identified. (hh)
