As I emerged from the third-floor media room at 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday in January, the darkened halls of St. Paul City Hall weren’t a complete surprise. I’d covered night meetings before.

The jolt was discovering that my wheelchair and I were locked inside. The lone skyway connecting City Hall to the rest of the downtown system closed at 5 p.m. The indoor path to my parking garage three blocks away was now barred to me.

Nearly an hour later — after I’d tracked down a security guard, who called a janitor, who used a key to unlock the Fourth Street door, from which I crossed the street to find another locked door, which forced me to roll halfway around the block to the doors of the Lowry Building, where I convinced a woman with a dog in the lobby to let me in, before returning to the skyway system and my car — I realized it could have been worse.

It could have been snowing.

Completed in 1932, St. Paul City Hall-Ramsey County Courthouse is an architectural marvel in my hometown, a 20-story Art Deco tower with a soaring atrium that is home to the massive Vision of Peace statue and leads to wood-paneled courtrooms and council chambers and city offices. For those with disabilities, however, it’s anything but welcoming.

The building complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), said Jean Krueger, property management director for Ramsey County, which owns and operates the building. Its link to the city’s skyway system closes at 5 p.m. for everybody, not just a guy in a wheelchair. When I talked to her, she admitted that wasn’t enough.

“Here, what you run into is the difference between what ADA requires — and we have accessible entry and exit at the street, so we are ADA-compliant,” Krueger said. “But that is entirely different than being accessible to everyone in a better fashion.”

It goes beyond staying warm and dry. Snow, ice and rain can make navigating streets and sidewalks by wheelchair nearly impossible.

While St. Paul developed its downtown skyway system to keep workers, shoppers and visitors protected from the elements, not all the skyways are open to the general closing time of midnight. City Hall closes at 4:30 p.m., so it closes its skyway at 5. The City Hall Annex, the city-owned building linking the courthouse skyway to the rest of the system, also closes at 5.

The city and county could come together to keep its skyway and the Annex open later. But that would require keeping security later. There’s been no talk of doing that, Krueger said.

Signs would be nice. Maybe a map.

If you’re in a wheelchair like me (I use one regularly because I have multiple sclerosis) and looking for a way to stay inside while traveling from the courthouse to the rest of the skyway system, good luck.

My plan was to attend the 3:30 p.m. meeting of the City Council to cover the last meeting of four outgoing councilmembers. I parked shortly after 2 p.m. in the Lawson Ramp, three blocks away but seemingly an easy trek on the skyway system. That changed when I reached the Lowry Building. In what used to be a quick trip on two feet, I couldn’t find an obvious wheelchair route to the adjoining Annex.

The connection passed through a couple small, inaccessible stairways. No go. So, I had to go outside and partly around the block, reenter the Annex at ground level and take the elevator back to the skyway. The courthouse guard there said he didn’t know a better way.

I found one. Later, while returning to my car to grab my chair’s battery charger, I went down to the ground floor of the Annex and found a door to a dim corridor in the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. That led to a second hallway that opened into the Lowry elevator lobby. Nothing marked the route.

Not that skyway access solves everything. Taina Maki, an aide to Council Member Rebecca Noecker, takes her manual wheelchair outside — weather permitting — because the incline in the skyway from the Victory Ramp where she parks “is kind of exhausting.” She is able to leave the building via the skyway, however. Her employee badge gives her access.

Maki has used a wheelchair for four years, after a blood clot in her spine took the use of her legs. The City Hall-Courthouse, she said, “is not a great building for people with a disability.”

She said Ramsey County is in the process of making changes to doors — the handicapped button and doorbell don’t always work. The Council Chambers are tough to navigate. Carpeting in the offices makes wheeling around fatiguing. Officials installed a button to open the council suite’s door after Maki asked for it.

“It’s very isolating,” Maki said of her disability. “There are just little things I’ve given up. If my colleagues want to go out to lunch, it’s like ‘I’ll meet you.’ Otherwise, you have to go down to the first floor and they get to walk out, but I’ve got to wait for a deputy to let me out. I don’t want to have a group of people waiting for me all the time.”

Noecker said Maki’s experiences, and mine, highlight a need for city officials to make the building not only more accessible but more welcoming to people with disabilities.

“It’s probably time for us to make some changes,” Noecker said.

In the past few weeks, I have talked to a handful of city and state officials. All of them said they’re sorry for my experience. Mark Zoller, St. Paul’s accessibility coordinator who started work in December, said he is working with 15 city departments to “update and improve our ADA plans” in regard to facilities, programs and services.

“Our goal, broadly, is make St. Paul a city that works for everyone,” he said Tuesday, adding: “I’m sure you’re not alone in experiencing something like that. Is there more we can do? The answer’s always going to be ‘Yes.'”

Later that day, St. Paul Deputy Mayor Jaime Tincher called to apologize as well. “A lot of this is eye-opening,” she said.

Tincher suggested a couple changes on her to-do list, and they could be made soon: putting a handicapped parking spot on the street outside City Hall and putting some signage in the Annex building “so it’s not a maze.”

In the end, during a couple subsequent trips to City Hall for interviews, I knew the way through the ups and downs of that “maze.” But, as the folks at the Minnesota Council on Disability told me, needing a wheelchair has changed what I do at City Hall. And when.

I get out of there before 5.