ADA Parking Compliance Audit in Sherwood, Oregon: What to Expect

Why a Sherwood Property Owner Orders an ADA Audit

Most Sherwood property owners do not think about ADA parking until something forces the issue — a demand letter, a complaint, a new tenant build-out, or a planned repave. An ADA compliance audit gets ahead of all of it. It is a structured inspection of your parking lot against the 2010 ADA Standards and Oregon requirements, producing a clear list of what passes, what fails, and what the fix involves.

This page walks through what to expect when you have a Sherwood lot audited. For the legal background behind each checkpoint, our ADA parking lot compliance guide for Oregon is the starting point, and our ADA compliance audit process page covers the inspection in depth.

This is general guidance. An audit gives you a property-specific picture a guide cannot.

What the Audit Measures

A thorough Sherwood audit checks every requirement an enforcement officer or plaintiff's expert would examine:

• Space count: Does the number of accessible spaces match your total? The ratio is one per 25 through the first 100.
• Van-accessible ratio: At least one in every six accessible spaces must be van-accessible.
• Dimensions: Accessible spaces at least 8 feet wide; access aisles 5 feet for standard, 8 feet for van.
• Slope: No more than 2 percent across spaces and aisles in any direction.
• Signage: Symbol signs at 60 inches minimum, van plates, and the Oregon fine sign.
• Surface: No potholes, no cracks over one-half inch, no abrupt level changes, no standing water in accessible areas.
• Accessible route: A continuous, compliant path from accessible spaces to the entrance.

Our common ADA parking violations checklist lists the failures we find most often, and most of them surface in the audit.

The Sherwood Wrinkles

A few things make Sherwood lots more likely to fail certain checkpoints.

Old Town versus new development. Sherwood's older Old Town lots often predate current dimension and van-aisle rules, so undersized aisles and narrow stalls are common findings there. Newer suburban lots usually fare better, but fast-track construction can still leave signage or slope gaps the audit catches.

Fill settlement and slope. Newer Sherwood development on fresh fill can settle, pushing an accessible space past the 2 percent ceiling within a few years. An auditor uses a digital level on every accessible space rather than a visual guess.

Freeze-thaw surface damage. Washington County's wet winters and overnight freezes open cracks and lift pavement edges. By spring, an accessible space that passed in fall can have a trip hazard at the aisle line. The audit documents these with photos and locations.

How the Audit Runs

A typical Sherwood audit is a single on-site visit. The inspector measures and photographs each accessible space, aisle, sign, and the route to the entrance, then compiles findings into a report:

1. Walk and measure — counts, widths, slopes, sign heights, surface condition.
2. Photo documentation — every finding tied to a location.
3. Findings report — each item marked pass or fail against the standard.
4. Remediation plan — fixes grouped as striping, signage, or grading and surface.

The output is something you can hand to a contractor for a scoped quote, or keep on file as evidence of good-faith compliance effort.

From Audit to Fix

The value of the audit is the plan it produces. Most Sherwood findings fall into three buckets. Striping fixes — pre-standard layouts, undersized aisles, faded symbols — are handled by restriping; see our parking lot striping in Sherwood page. Signage fixes mean installing or raising signs and adding the Oregon fine plate. Surface and slope fixes — potholes, wide cracks, over-2-percent grades — may need patching or regrading first.

Bundling these into one mobilization saves money, and a repave is the ideal time to correct everything at once since the alteration already triggers the path-of-travel obligation.