New City Leader Urges More Help for Disabled : Government: Councilman Fox wants Thousand Oaks to surpass federal requirements in housing.

Distressed by the city’s shortcomings in providing access to the physically disabled, Councilman Andy Fox is proposing that Thousand Oaks go beyond federal requirements for the disabled in all city-funded housing projects.

As his first action since being sworn in last month, Fox said he will ask the city at Tuesday’s meeting to take a more common-sense approach to working with laws.

“Where the city has a financial interest, I’d like to see us follow not only the letter of the law, but the spirit,” Fox said Friday.

In particular, Fox wants to see improvements at The Groves, a city-subsidized condominium project where curbs and staircases hinder wheelchair access. Beyond that, he said he hopes to reshape the city’s policy on such issues, encouraging interaction among the Mayor’s Business Roundtable, the Disabled Access Appeals Advisory Board and other city officials.

In some cases, he said, the law simply does not work effectively, and the city should impose stricter guidelines.

“We need to take a practical, hands-on, everyday, John Smith view of how this affects people,” he said. “The Groves is just one example.”

Residents of The Groves have complained to the city that construction on the condominiums, which range in price from $119,000 to $169,000, is shoddy. Additionally they say wheelchair access into the complex is poorly planned and inadequate.

There are wheelchair ramps, but they lead to uncut curbs, and residents must still climb stairs to get to all of the units. The builder, Amcal Diversified Corp., has said the company spent more than $100,000 providing ramps and rails, as well as including the structural capability to install elevators. Residents would have to pay to install the lifts.

The city provides subsidies of between $16,000 and $21,000 to low-income families who want to buy condominiums in the project, just off the Ventura Freeway. City officials say the complex is not subject to federal regulations.

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Fox said he believes the builders made a good-faith effort to offer disabled access anyway, but that the results just do not work.

“It’s obvious to me that an attempt was made to address handicapped issues,” Fox said. “But while following the letter of the law, maybe the letter of the law doesn’t go far enough to get a person in a wheelchair from point A to point B.”

As a planning commissioner, Fox said, he probably reviewed the project in its early stages. But in general, he said, it is hard to see how a project will turn out by looking at plans.

“Since the project hasn’t been built yet there is no way to go over and look,” he said. “Then this project gets built and you go over and look and see that it doesn’t work.”