Wheelchair Ramp Installation Project Underway

Wheelchair ramps are being installed at street intersections across Union City to bring them up to federal accessibility standards.

As part of its consent agenda at its meeting last week, the City Council awarded a $215,320 contract to Oakland-based Rosas Brothers Construction to install 25 new wheelchair ramps across town this year and to upgrade about 100 more to meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.

The company will also add 36 yellow warning surface panels to existing ramps at various street intersections.

Eight bids were opened on March 31. The lowest bidder was Rosas Brothers, with whom the city has worked in the past. The bid is 30 percent below the $310,000 that the city estimated the project would cost, so city engineers will come up with about 30 additional locations to install more ramps, according to director Mintze Cheng.

Cheng said 90 percent of funding for the project is coming from Proposition 42, which funds transportation projects across the state through taxes on the sale of gasoline.

The other 10 percent is through Measure B, a ballot measure passed by Alameda County voters in 2000 to continue the county's half-cent sales tax for transportation projects through March 2022.

Rosas Brothers employees worked ahead of the council's formal approval of the contract to take advantage of spring break at Union City schools, where several of the ramps were slated to be installed.

As head of public works, Cheng said she can authorize projects costing under $25,000, so they bit off a chunk of the plan to begin early.

"This is a very unique situation," Cheng said. "They will just continue working until it's finished," which will be sometime in the early summer months, she said.

The 2010 update to Union City's Transition Plan, adopted by the City Council on Feb. 23, 2010, identified 108 locations, excluding the steep Seven Hills area, which lacked wheelchair ramps.

City staff found 1,551 locations where ramps no longer strictly complied with current ADA standards and 280 locations where they did.

The 25 identified locations for new ramps:

• One on Hop Ranch Road in front of Cesar Chavez Middle School
• Six surrounding Pioneer Elementary and Park
• Five surrounding Cabello Elementary and Veterans Park, two of them on  Dyer Street
• Five additional ramps at intersections on Dyer Street
• Three at intersections on Christine Drive
• Two at intersections on Marsten Avenue
• Threet at intersections on Horner Street