The State of Accessibility in Livonia

Michigan law guarantees every resident with a disability the right to participate fully in civic life — to vote privately and independently, to attend a public meeting, to use a public building without encountering unnecessary barriers. In Livonia, a look at the audit data, the city's own compliance records, and the accounts of local advocates suggests that guarantee is unevenly met, and that the gap between what the law requires and what actually exists on the ground is, in places, well documented.

The Legal Framework, Layer by Layer

Disability rights in the United States come from a layered system: federal law sets the floor, states can add stronger protections, and cities are responsible for putting those rules into practice.

Federal law. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, passed in 1973, prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in any program or activity receiving federal funding or run by a federal agency. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, goes further, reaching private businesses as well as government — Title I covers employment, Title II covers state and local government, and Title III covers public accommodations. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 specifically requires that voting systems allow independent and private voting for all voters, including those with disabilities.

State law. Michigan strengthens the federal baseline through the Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act (PWDCRA), enacted in 1976. Where the ADA only requires reasonable accommodations from employers with 15 or more workers, the PWDCRA applies to every Michigan employer regardless of size, and requires reasonable accommodations across employment, public services, public accommodations, education, and housing. Michigan's Barrier Free Design Act (Act 1 of 1966) separately sets accessibility standards for public buildings and created a Barrier Free Design Board to oversee compliance. The Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) enforces the PWDCRA and investigates disability discrimination complaints.

Local law. Under ADA Title II, a municipality is a "public entity" with specific legal duties. Any entity with 50 or more employees must designate an ADA Coordinator, establish a formal grievance procedure, complete a self-evaluation of its programs and facilities, and develop a Transition Plan — a public document listing physical barriers and a schedule for removing them. A common misconception is that older buildings are automatically "grandfathered in" and exempt — that isn't accurate. A city may not have to immediately renovate an inaccessible historic building, but it must still find another way to make the program accessible, such as relocating a meeting or offering a service at an accessible location.

Livonia's own website confirms one piece of this framework in practice: under Title II, the City Clerk's Office will make reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities at public meetings, provided adequate advance notice is given.

What "Accessible" Actually Means, Technically

The 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, published by the Department of Justice, spell out the physical specifications behind the law. A compliant ramp can't exceed a 1:12 slope, can't rise more than 30 inches without a landing, and needs handrails on both sides whenever its rise exceeds 6 inches. An accessible route generally needs at least 36 inches of clear width, and its cross-slope can't exceed roughly 2%. Parking requirements scale with lot size — a lot with 76 to 100 spaces needs 4 accessible spaces, at least one van-accessible.

These aren't abstract numbers; as the sections below show, they're the exact measurements Livonia's own facilities have been found not to meet.

How Accessible Are Livonia's Polling Places?

In April 2026, the nonprofit Detroit Disability Power (DDP) published its third annual polling place accessibility audit, conducted with support from The Carter Center. Trained volunteers visited 447 polling places across 45 Michigan jurisdictions — including Livonia — during the May, August, and November 2025 elections, checking each site against four legally required measures: accessible parking and pathways, an accessible entrance, a fully functional Voter Assist Terminal (VAT), and a properly set-up wheelchair-height voting booth.

Statewide, the results were sobering: only 10% of the 415 Election Day polling locations audited met all four accessibility criteria, a decline from 13% in 2024 and 16% in 2022. Just 36% of locations had a fully functional VAT — the single most common barrier — down sharply from 62% the year before. DDP found that 93 sites failed on only one of the four measures; fixing those alone would nearly triple the statewide accessible rate, to 32%.

Livonia's Numbers

Livonia was one of the audited jurisdictions, with DDP volunteers observing 14 Election Day polling locations and one early voting site in 2025:

In other words, Livonia's polling places tend to have decent physical access — parking, pathways, and entrances — but fall down on the accessible voting equipment that lets voters with disabilities cast a ballot independently, a pattern DDP found was common statewide. Nearly one in four adults in Livonia has a disability, according to CDC data cited in the report — 19,137 of the city's roughly 78,430 adult residents.

Inside the School-by-School Data

All 14 of Livonia's audited Election Day polling locations in 2025 were public schools — Buchanan, Clarenceville High, Coolidge, Emerson, Frost, Grant, Holmes, Hoover, Kennedy, Randolph, Riley, Roosevelt, Rosedale, and Webster. The pattern was consistent: physical basics like marked parking and unlocked entrances were almost universal, but privacy and setup often fell short.

• VAT privacy failed at 7 of the 14 schools, with machines facing the room, the main entrance, or the check-in line. At Holmes and Coolidge, poll workers corrected the issue on the spot once flagged.
• Headphones weren't plugged in at 3 schools (Coolidge, Grant, Randolph), and Coolidge also had its controller unplugged.
• A wheelchair-height voting booth was missing entirely at 2 schools (Holmes and Riley), and Webster had a booth that wasn't set up.
• Booth privacy failed at 2 schools (Buchanan and Webster), both times because the booth shared a table with the VAT with no privacy screen.
• At Kennedy School, wall-mounted cafeteria tables and benches, left in the down position, blocked wheelchair access to the VAT.

Statewide, DDP's data shows the VAT is the most fixable barrier of all — the machine itself was usually present and correctly positioned; the failure was almost always something small, like headphones not plugged in. DDP found 115 polling locations statewide with unplugged headphones present, calling it "a zero-cost fix." The organization's core recommendations to election officials reflect this: designate an accessibility contact in each jurisdiction, run a hands-on "practice election" during poll worker training, and set up VATs and voting booths before polls open rather than on request.

Federal guidance is explicit that closing an inaccessible polling place isn't an acceptable fix on its own — officials must either make a facility accessible or provide the program at an alternative accessible location. DDP's report notes that some jurisdictions nationally have used inaccessibility as a pretext for closures that suppress voter participation.

City Hall: A Documented Problem, a Year Before It Made the News

Livonia's polling-place challenges extend beyond the 14 schools DDP's volunteers visited — they reach City Hall itself, which has served as the city's early voting site and is doing so again for the 2026 primary and general elections.

DDP's own raw audit data shows this directly. A DDP observer visited City Hall (33000 Civic Center Drive) during the August 2025 early voting period and documented problems that would surface in local news coverage nearly a year later: the path from the parking lot was obstructed by cones propping doors open, and the observer separately flagged that the ramp outside is very long with no midpoint landing pad, noting the grade may also be too steep and citing reports of previous injuries on the ramp. The VAT wasn't initially positioned for voter privacy, though poll workers had a workaround — letting the voter get situated, then rolling the machine to face the wall. Accessible parking, the entrance, and the voting booth all passed the audit's criteria at this site.

Local reporting in June 2026 confirmed the same underlying issue was still unresolved. Advocate Laura Jannika told reporters City Hall lacks an accessible bathroom and that officials have known about the barriers for decades. The city has since installed a temporary ramp — reportedly costing around $20,000 — while it works on repairing the permanent concrete ramp, a fix expected to cost roughly $3,000–$5,000 and take about a week once underway. Assistant City Engineer David Lear acknowledged the issue has been "an ongoing controversy for years," while maintaining the new temporary ramp meets ADA requirements.

Taken together, DDP's audit and the 2026 news coverage describe the same ramp roughly a year apart — meaning the slope and lack of landing were flagged by independent observers well before becoming a subject of public controversy ahead of this year's elections.

City Hall serves as Livonia's sole early voting site for both the August 2026 primary and November 2026 general election, with early voting scheduled for July 25–August 2 and October 24–November 1. Advocates have suggested alternate locations — the public library, the old city courthouse, or the former senior center — could serve as accessible annexes, arguing that concentrating all early voting at a site with known access problems creates unnecessary barriers.

A Related Fight Over Remote Access to Meetings

Physical access to City Hall has become the focus of a second, related discussion: whether residents should be able to participate in City Council meetings remotely. Longtime resident Kathleen Bilger, who has a knee injury, told local reporters getting to City Hall in person is difficult and that she rarely manages to attend meetings as a result. Currently, residents who can't attend in person can only watch a livestream — they can't take part in audience comment.

City Council Vice President Patrick Brockway said the city is seriously considering adding Zoom as an option, noting it was used during the pandemic and is already in use elsewhere; he connected the issue directly to the city's obligations under ADA Title II. Resident Sally Del Vecchio said she was glad the conversation was happening. The city reportedly reviewed the topic for about six months before findings were presented at a City Hall Auditorium meeting on July 20, 2026.

The Mayor's Own Admission

Perhaps the most direct confirmation of City Hall's inaccessibility comes not from an audit or a news report, but from Mayor Maureen Miller Brosnan herself. In her 2024 State of the City address, Brosnan told residents plainly:

"We are learning that we are not ADA compliant in terms of what a modern building should be."

She pointed specifically to entryways and restrooms, explaining that the steel-and-concrete construction of City Hall's walls makes widening them for accessibility "begin to appear impossible." The practical consequence, in her own words:

"If we wanted to hire somebody in a wheelchair to work in City Hall we can't."

She made the same admission about the Livonia Police Department building, saying it likewise "doesn't measure up to the ADA standards."

Brosnan tied these admissions to a broader assessment: a facilities study by Plante Moran Realpoint found that Livonia's core municipal buildings — City Hall (built in 1978) and its Annex (built in the 1950s), along with the police station (built in 1961) — are functionally obsolete, with an estimated $97 million in maintenance costs projected over the next decade if left as-is. She described chronic leaking roofs, mold, outdated HVAC systems, and a 2024 incident in which floor tiles in the City Hall lobby buckled and broke loose.

The city's response was not a near-term ADA retrofit — it was a long-range redevelopment plan. Under an initiative called "Livonia Vision 21" and its first phase, "Project Catalyst," the city intended to eventually demolish and relocate City Hall and the police department entirely, as part of a larger downtown redevelopment centered at Five Mile and Farmington roads. As of the 2024 address, the funding secured — $20.75 million from a mix of American Rescue Plan Act city funds, congressional earmarks, state budget allocations, and Wayne County funding — was earmarked for a new Senior Wellness Center attached to the Jack E. Kirksey Recreation Center, not for City Hall or the police station. The relocation of City Hall and the police department was described as a later, unfunded phase of the plan, contingent on demolishing the current senior center and 16th District Court sites first.

What Livonia's ADA Transition Plan Actually Covers

A document obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request — titled "Livonia Transition Plan" — offers a look at how the city is tracking its ADA compliance obligations. A close read shows the plan is narrower than its title suggests, in two specific ways.

It's a Parks and Recreation plan, not a citywide one

The document's header names a single point of contact: Ted Davis, Superintendent of Parks and Recreation. The plan lists 2,091 individual corrective action line items across 46 distinct sites, and every one of those sites is a park, pool, golf course, ice arena, or similar Parks and Recreation facility — Archery Range, Bicentennial Park & Nature Preserve, Botsford Pool, Devon-Aire Arena, the Jack E. Kirksey Recreation Center, Fox Creek Golf Course, the Livonia Senior Center, and Whispering Willows Golf Course, among others. Nowhere in the document do City Hall, the 16th District Court, the Livonia Police Department, fire stations, or the public libraries appear. Under Title II, a self-evaluation and transition plan are supposed to cover all of a public entity's programs and facilities, not just one department's — so this plan, however detailed, leaves the accessibility status of the rest of the city's buildings undocumented in this record.

It has a priority order, but no timeline

Each line item is assigned a numeric "Phase" from 1 to 5, functioning as a rough priority ranking — Phase 1 items tend to be cheap, easy fixes like repainting parking stall lines, while Phase 5 items skew toward larger changes like replacing picnic tables with accessible models. Phase 1 alone accounts for 1,176 of the 2,091 items and roughly $1.68 million of the plan's estimated $4.3 million total cost. But nothing in the spreadsheet's nine columns — Site, Cite, Type of correction, Recommendation, Price/unit, # of units, Unit type, Total cost, and Phase — indicates when any phase is supposed to be finished. DOJ guidance on ADA Title II transition plans calls for a schedule for taking necessary steps, not just a prioritized list; without dates attached, it's difficult for the public or the city itself to assess whether corrections are on track, overdue, or indefinitely deferred.

A sworn statement confirms this is all that exists

In a signed affidavit dated June 22, 2026, Michelle Koppin, Interim Superintendent of Parks and Recreation, swore under oath that she made "diligent inquiry into the existence of documents related to the current ADA transition plan for all City Departments," and that the only documents she has are "the WT Group reports that were provided" — an apparent reference to the same Parks and Recreation data described above. The affidavit further states there is no signed document for ADA Transition Plan Completion, and that, on information and belief, no further responsive records exist within the city's files.

In other words, according to the department's own sworn statement, this Parks-only document appears to be the only ADA transition plan documentation the city has on file, for any department.

Who to Contact — and Understanding the ADA Coordinator's Role

If you've run into an accessibility barrier in Livonia — a locked ramp, an inaccessible polling place, a public meeting you can't get into — there are several paths available.

Start with the city's ADA Coordinator. Every public entity with 50 or more employees must designate an ADA Coordinator: a staff member responsible for coordinating compliance efforts, investigating complaints, and serving as the public point of contact for accessibility issues. The City of Livonia's website lists Assistant City Attorney Eric Goldstein as a contact tied to ADA matters. His role as Assistant City Attorney is confirmed through the city's own staff directory; the specific title "ADA Coordinator" was not independently verifiable through a public source and is included here based on information provided directly to us.

But understand what that role is — and isn't. An ADA Coordinator is a compliance official who works for the public entity — in this case, the City of Livonia. Their job is to help the city meet its legal obligations: overseeing self-evaluations, maintaining a grievance procedure, investigating complaints, and coordinating the city's own response to accessibility issues. That is different from being an independent advocate for the person raising the concern. The role centers on compliance oversight and administering the entity's own processes, not on advocating against the entity on an individual's behalf. A resident's first stop with a straightforward complaint may reasonably be the ADA Coordinator's office — it's the legally required starting point. But if a concern isn't adequately addressed, or the dispute is specifically about whether the city itself is meeting its obligations, an ADA Coordinator working within city government isn't positioned to serve as the resident's advocate against that same government. That's the role independent disability rights organizations exist to fill.

Local and Regional Resources

• Access Livonia NOW 504 — A grassroots group focused specifically on accessibility issues in Livonia. Karen Greenwald, a disability advocate involved with the group, has been active in pushing for accessibility improvements at City Hall and elsewhere in the city. WXYZ's June 2026 reporting independently confirms the existence of "Access Livonia NOW 504" as a grassroots organization, quoting a disability advocate by the name "Karen Green" in connection with it — a spelling worth noting given the slight difference.
• Disability Rights Michigan (DRM) — Provides information on accessibility law and can help residents understand complaint processes, though DRM notes that using its informational resources doesn't create an attorney-client relationship. Reach DRM at 800-288-5923.
• Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) — Investigates disability discrimination complaints under the PWDCRA and is a resource for complaints against municipalities. Reach MDCR at 800-482-3604 (voice) or 877-878-8464 (TTY), or through its online complaint portal.
• Detroit Disability Power (DDP) — The Detroit-based organization behind the polling place audits covered above, building political power for the disability community across housing, transportation, healthcare, and voting rights. DDP is fiscally sponsored by the Michigan Disability Rights Coalition.
• U.S. Department of Justice ADA Information Line — The federal resource for general ADA questions, reachable at 800-514-0301 (voice) or 800-514-0383 (TTY).

For a straightforward, correctable issue — an unplugged VAT headset, a blocked ramp, a locked entrance — raising it directly with the relevant city office is often the fastest route to a fix. For a broader concern about whether the city is meeting its obligations, Disability Rights Michigan or MDCR are the next step, and local groups like Access Livonia NOW 504 can offer both support and a track record of what's worked in pushing the city toward compliance.

The Bigger Picture

Layer by layer, the pattern in Livonia looks consistent. Federal and state law set clear, specific, and technically detailed accessibility standards. The city has publicly committed, on paper, to meeting them for public meetings. But the available records tell a more uneven story: polling places with decent parking and entrances but frequently non-private, improperly set-up voting equipment; a City Hall ramp problem documented by independent auditors a full year before it became public controversy; the Mayor's own public acknowledgment that City Hall isn't ADA compliant and can't currently employ a wheelchair user; and an ADA transition plan that, by the city's own sworn admission, exists only for parks and recreation facilities — with no timeline attached even to the corrections it does track.

None of this means the barriers are unfixable. DDP's own audits emphasize that most of what they found — unplugged headphones, poorly angled VAT screens, missing signage — requires no construction budget and no new legislation, just attention and follow-through. Whether that follow-through happens is likely to depend on the same combination that has surfaced repeatedly in this record: sustained scrutiny from residents, advocates, and reporters, and a city government willing to treat accessibility as more than a line item to revisit later.

What makes things difficult is there is no specific timeline in place that municipalities are required to meet to meet ADA requirements. There is also a lack of enforcement at a state and federal level. This means that it often comes down to advocates to push issues and municipality priorities.

Questions and a request for comment have been sent to Livonia's ADA coordinator Eric Goldstein, but there has been no response so far. If a response is received, I will make that response available.