‘Vital Link’ for Callers : City Council to Install TDD Devices for Deaf

Devices that will enable Los Angeles City Council members to receive telephone calls from the deaf will be installed in their district offices in the next few weeks, Councilwoman Joy Picus said Thursday.

With the telephone-teletype machines, known as TDDs, a conversation is conducted by typing messages on a keyboard. The words then appearing on a video screen at the other end of the phone line and also are printed out.

The City Council in February allocated nearly $20,000 to buy 22 machines, one for each of the 14 City Council members’ district offices and the mayor’s field offices.

Picus, who proposed the purchase of the machines, called them a “vital link” that enables the hearing-impaired to “contact their local elected officials for assistance or information, and to express their views.”

Picus’ district office in Reseda received the first of the council TDDs Tuesday. The San Fernando Valley offices of State Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) and U. S. Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Studio City) also have TDD lines.

Teri Burns, a legislative aide for Robbins, said his district office in Van Nuys has had the TDD line for three years and uses it for an average of three to five calls a month. Burns said the line also is used to enable deaf people in the community to communicate with other agencies that don’t have one.

Nona Edelen, field representative for Berman, said his Panorama City office also has averaged three to five calls a month since installing the TDD line in July. She said it took three years of fighting governmental red tape to get funding for the machine.

“The machine was not on the normally approved equipment list for office supplies,” she said.

Marcella Meyer, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness, said the cost of the machines--from $240 to $1,000 each--and “bureaucratic insensitivity” are the reasons they are not in many government offices, hospitals, police and fire departments.

“It’s a big step,” Meyer said of the City Council’s purchase of the machines. “It gives us more accessibility to the political process that we’d never had in the past.”

Picus said that Los Angeles has about 500,000 hearing-impaired residents, but Meyer said the figure may be as high as 750,000, with 250,000 living in the Valley area. Thousands of them have the TDD machines, Meyer said.

The TDD telephone number for Picus’ office is (818) 345-6624. The number for Robbins is (818) 901-5555 and, for Berman, (818) 891-0543.