Twists and turns of the stairway chairlift (Activity Report)

Easy at first glance

Several factors have made the inclined stairway chairlift project seem like it would be easy. They include:

1. Two experienced vendors recommended the same make/model for our particular needs (Bruno Elite Curved), which they selected from among their broader (and fortunately overlapping) product lines.
2. As I have noted, that particular model is well established and well regarded. It is available with a commercial-grade package of safety features and controls.
3. Installation of that model is normally completed in a single day. The installer fits together the pieces of track, and then bolts the track’s footings to the stair treads. Done!

Below the jump, this post enumerates the much longer list of factors that have made the project difficult.…

Difficult in practice

Factors that have made this project difficult (and painfully slow) include the following:

1. Thanks to the existence of gravity, any conveyance between a building’s levels, such as a stairway chairlift, involves more safety risks than the usual building project. There is potential liability if a rider should bump into someone else, or themselves somehow be injured in a fall. Our synagogue’s liability insurance would cover such an incident only if the lift were fully permitted by the city/state.
2. California’s safety requirements for conveyances in non-residential spaces are quite rigorous, as noted here—adding significantly to the overall cost with little value added.
3. Stairway chairlifts involve not only a building permit (and an electrical permit for the power supply) but also an elevator inspection permit. The application process is a sequential one.
4. State regulations pose a hefty potential penalty if the building owner does not get a city/state permit: a separate misdemeanor violation for every day that an unpermitted lift is in operation.
5. Stairway chairlifts do not meet ADA requirements, because someone in a wheelchair must transfer onto the chairlift seat and then back to the wheelchair, which is considered unacceptable. Therefore, most commercial building owners opt instead for an ADA-compliant alternative (inclined platform lift, vertical platform lift, or elevator). Installing a stairway chairlift surely could help many people, yet it cannot obviate our eventual need to install some way for a person in a wheelchair to get to the basement.
6. As a result of both the state safety requirements and the federal ADA requirements, stairway chairlifts are very rare in commercial settings. During the past 12 years, only one building owner in Los Angeles has sought the building/elevator permits for a lift like this one. (The rest have not bothered with a permit.) 
7. Few vendors of stairway chairlifts in this region involve themselves in commercial settings. (Most of them work only in residential settings, where the state requirements are minimal.)
8. In the City’s registry of approved lifts, Mishkon was already listed as having an inclined platform lift in the stairwell in question, installed in 2008. Finding out the proper procedure for decommissioning the previous lift (another rare event!) took time, as did ascertaining how that history affected our getting permission for the new lift. A couple of well-meaning City officials told us that it was a matter of revising our existing permit, as opposed to getting a new permit—which turned out not to be true.
9. For commercial settings, the state’s requirements for stairway chairlifts are vague and internally contradictory when it comes to the necessary installer qualifications.
10. Only one vendor in the entire Los Angeles area is unequivocally qualified by the state to install stairway chairlifts. (And they installed the only fully legal commercial-grade stairway chairlift in L.A. within the past 12 years. Yes, there has been only one such installation.) Unfortunately, that vendor took 2½ months to submit a price quote to us, and throughout has generally been vague or unresponsive to our queries. 
11. Under one interpretation of state law, there is a second local vendor that is likewise qualified to install in commercial settings. (We preferred to work with this vendor because they had been very responsive—and also offered a much better price and a longer warranty period.) However, it has proven elusive to get an authoritative determination of whether their license was adequate. Last month, we learned that it would need to come from a yet-to-be-identified Cal/OSHA bureaucrat, rather than from the City.
12. This second vendor was at first game to try to win approval, but eventually they handed off the project to the first vendor, after the owner of the latter promised to handle our case personally and to take good care of us. This hand-off was done in order to not to slow down or otherwise jeopardize our approval process. Yet of course there is some friction (delay) in any such transition.
13. Commercial installations of stairway chairlifts are so rare that almost nobody knows what is necessary to secure approval of government permits. We asked four architects (including the one who had prepared the drawings for the previous lift in that stairwell in 2007) and a professional expediter, and none knew the answer. Likewise the building department’s plan checker whom we eventually paid for a consultation could not tell us exactly what we would need in our application. Even in the elevator inspection section, only one staff member is still around who had handled such a case. (We were eventually fortunate enough to find an expediter who had handled getting government permits for such a lift before—once, about 15 years ago. That was the breakthrough moment.)