pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-10-11.pdf, 6
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2017-10-11 | 6 | ITEM 2-A COMMISSION ON DISABILITY ISSUES MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, October 11, 2017 6:30 p.m. Beth Kenny: So are the businesses and organizations that you work with, are they self-selecting in that they reach out to you? Or do you ever get have people who are referred. that might be having problems understanding, whether it be the ADA or Unruh Act, can they be referred to you. Jan Garrett: They can, and people call us all the time that are referred. But because we're a neutral entity, and I do want to stress that. We don't do enforcement of any kind, and we don't take a side. We just tell people what the law is. And we think it's important that we're neutral because we do want everyone to call us, and we want people to know that if they call us, we're not going to call Department of Justice, or we're not going to call Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to tell on them or to turn them in, in some way. We're just going to give them information. And sometimes an employee can call us and tell us, an employee with a disability, many things that are happening and the difficulty they may be having with reasonable accommodation with their employer, and 10 minutes later the employer calls, and it's clear that it's the employer of the employee who had just called. Jan Garrett: But because all of our calls are confidential, we don't tell either one of them that we have talked to the other, and we give them both the same information. So that's one advantage of having us is that we would give everybody the same information across the board. We don't take sides, we don't enforce, and we don't reveal any calls or emails that we've had. Beth Kenny: Well, thank you very much. Does anyone else have a question? Tony Lewis: I have one more. So in a case, there was a gentlemen two weeks ago who mentioned to me, he was in a wheelchair. At the post office, he has a PO Box that's out of his reach from his wheelchair, and so what's customary was, he asked the person behind the window to get his mail out of his PO Box, and she refused, because she said that it was illegal for her to touch someone's mail. So he was upset, and the customers in line were upset, everybody was upset about it. What you're saying is that you wouldn't call the post office and say, "Hey you're out of compliance.' You would just give him the information, the citation of the law, and say to him, "This is what you can tell the person." Jan Garrett: Well, we would give him the information, and if we know that someone can complain to a specific person, if we know that there's a specific entity or person with whom they can file a complaint, we will tell them how to do that. We will give them the website or the phone number, the name of the entity or the person, and tell them that they can file a complaint. For example, US Postal Service is under the Rehabilitation Act because it's federal government, and we would tell people to complain to the Postmaster, because that's who they would have to work with in terms of anything disability-related and mail. And that's our understanding. But we know who to complain to a Department of Justice, we know the complaint process at EEOC, at lots of the state agencies, so we would not only give them what the law is, but we would tell them how to complain, if that's what they wish to do. Beth Kenny: Does anyone else have any more questions? Well, thank you very much Jan, this was very informative. I'm really looking forward to checking out the emergency preparedness stuff you have, and I'd love to touch base with you at some point about it. 12/13/17 Page 6 of 16 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-10-11.pdf |