ADA Frankenstein! Tab on ramp for SF supervisors' chamber adding up ( or is it just friends and relatives)

Graft Built it before the 1906 Quake and still things don't seem to have changed much.

Tab on ramp for SF supervisors' chamber adding up

August 29, 2011 Matier & Ross SF Chronicle Columnists

What costs more: a home in San Francisco's Sunset District, or a wheelchair ramp in the Board of Supervisors' chambers?

If you picked the house, you're wrong.

By the time the final tab comes in, the cost of designing and installing a ramp to the president's chair at the Board of Supervisors - a project now under way - is expected to top out at $699,413.

That is about $50,000 more than the median cost of a home in the Sunset.

Why so much for a 10-foot ramp?

First, it took two companies, at a total cost of $132,205, to come up with a design that passed architectural muster for a designated historic landmark. The cost in city staff time to oversee the planning hit $38,434. That's $170,639.

Then came the job itself....

ONE VOICE OF SANITY, RARE IN SF-

Supervisor John Avalos - the lone "no" vote on the project when the board approved it in February- said the political math just doesn't add up.

"This is a tremendous amount of money being spent on something in City Hall that rarely or may never even get used," Avalos said.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/28/BA7I1KMRO0.DTL#ixzz1WR1NwZmN