PUBLIC SERVICE IS A NOBLE CALLING

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.