At its April 2 meeting, the Archuleta County Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) approved hiring a staff member to assist the county in meeting new American Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance requirements for the county website imposed by Colorado House Bill 21-110.
The issue of the requirement for the website to be accessible per the ADA and the challenges of doing this with the current staff available was discussed at prior BoCC work sessions, where County Manager Derek Woodman proposed the potential hiring of a digital accessibility coordinator position to assist the county in completing the project.
At these work sessions, the commissioners raised concerns about the costs and impact of this state mandate, and Commissioner Ronnie Maez proposed the possibility of taking down the county website to mitigate costs.
At the April 2 meeting, Woodman explained that the county must have its website fully ADA accessible by July 1.
“County staff have been working tirelessly to bring this county website into compliance,” Woodman said. “The volume of the work needed to comply with this requirement has already taken ... county staff hundreds of hours, and an enormous amount of work remains. Once the website is fully ADA accessible, it will still require a full-time staff member to keep it up to date.”
He stated that the BoCC was being presented with two options concerning the accessibility coordinator, including hiring a full-time temporary employee without benefits for six months with a cost not to exceed $24,000 or hiring a full-time position with benefits for the remainder of 2024 at a cost not to exceed $45,000.
“This unfunded mandate is not going to be going away at the end of this year,” Commissioner Warren Brown commented. “We are still going to need a person continuously, so I don’t see the purpose of a temporary full-time position unless that’s all we could find in our pool of applicants. But, other than that, I say we just have to have a full-time from here forward. This is what we’ve been mandated to do by the state; this is where we are.”
Commissioner Veronica Medina asked where the county would be obtaining the funds for this position, adding that she agreed with Brown that a permanent full-time position would be needed.
Woodman stated that there is roughly $4,000 in cost savings in the IT Department budget and that the balance could be taken from Payment in Lieu of Taxes funds.
Medina asked if the county already has “somebody in mind for this position.”
Woodman stated that the county has identified a suitable local applicant with a background in Web design who was interviewed as part of a job search in the IT Department.
Commissioner Ronnie Maez then asked County Attorney Todd Weaver a question as the “devil’s advocate.”
“It’s an unfunded mandate, OK, and the other part of it is I understand staff put in some time and everything with this to get it to where it is right now and I’m probably gonna vote in favor of it but, the public still needs to hear it,” Maez said. “Do we absolutely have to have this or do we have to implement this, Todd, I mean with our website, or do we just have to keep it general? ... And I know staff put a lot of hard work into it too, but staff got paid for it, too, so I understand that.”
Weaver answered that state statute currently encourages counties and other local governments to have their meeting notices and agendas available digitally and that, in the future, counties will be required to post such notices online.
Maez asked what the alternative to this is, to which Weaver responded that there is not one.
Weaver noted that there may soon be additional requirements for digital posting of meeting materials, including those for work sessions.
He also noted that the Colorado Revised Statutes he was examining and many other state websites do not meet ADA standards.
“OK, they can’t get it together and they expect us to do it on a deadline,” Maez said. “That’s interesting.”
Brown then made a motion to approve hiring a full-time digital accessibility coordinator with benefits through the end of 2024 and to direct the county manager to offer the position to an applicant.
Medina seconded the motion, although she added that she would like the motion to include language stipulating that the county manager allocated the funds to support the position as previously described.
Brown asked Weaver if he felt this amendment would be necessary.
Weaver stated that this change would be a “helpful” clarification, although it would not be required.
Brown amended his motion to include the verbiage that Medina requested.
The BoCC then unanimously approved the motion.
