MY WIFE HEIDI JOHNSON-WRIGHT
HAS HEEDED IT FOR NEARLY FOUR DECADES
My wife Heidi, celebrates her birthday today.
I am proud of her lifelong career as a public servant.
When she was in law school at Ohio
State University, she interned at a state agency in our native Ohio.
Even in undergrad, she volunteered on
a campus programing board that served the state of Ohio at Kent State
University.
She practiced law her first decade out
of law school, for a pair of state agencies in Ohio.
After we moved to Miami in 2000, Heidi
became the first full-time Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Coordinator
for the City of Miami Beach.
She was in her first decade as a proud
public servant there when Miami-Dade County – one of the largest (in population
and land mass) government bodies in the U.S. – did a nationwide, high-level
candidate search for the next person to guide its ADA department.
Heidi has now proudly served
Miami-Dade for a decade and a half. She has endured the late 2009-2010
financial crisis that saw virtually all of her staff laid off or forced into
early retirement.
ADA was abolished as a department
under some of the worst mayoral “leadership” this county has ever known. A
mayor who filled the county with cronies cared not a moment about people with disabilities.
Now, under Mayor Daniella Levine Cava,
the ADA office has at least regained about one third the level of staffing that
it traditionally had for decades.
Heidi and her hand-picked group of
expert pros are now empowered to ensure that Miami-Dade’s vast facilities and
programs are accessible to all.
There are still great hurdles.
Miami-Dade could use tens of thousands of affordable, accessible housing units.
People with disabilities are by far
the most under and unemployed of all minority groups.
The face an impossible reality of less
than 1 percent of all U.S. housing being move-in ready for wheelchair users.
Some housing bureaucrats still push
back mightily on the idea that even a few units (required by federal law)
should be move-in ready for people with disabilities.
They insanely plot to pass adaptation
costs on to impoverished people with disabilities.
Those clueless policies cause
homelessness and worse.
Hopefully, Mayor Levine Cava will get
another term and continue to empower Heidi to influence other departments – from
airport to seaport to parks, transit and housing – to follow federal law by making
100 percent of buildings and programs accessible to all.
