Roll Up, Roll Up for the Dog and Monkey Show

by Vin Suprynowicz
by Vin Suprynowicz

DIGG THIS

Proponents were full of assurances as they took their dog-and-wheelchair show around the country back in the late 1980s: The proposed Americans with Disabilities Act wouldn’t impose undue costs or hardships on businesses. It would simply require a few “reasonable accommodations.”

Widen a doorway here, provide a wheelchair ramp there – there weren’t even likely to be many lawsuits.

The ADA was enacted into law in 1990, and now approaches its 20th birthday. Let’s just say compliance costs have turned out to be a bit higher than estimated; the “not many lawsuits” promise was Dead on Arrival, and even after 18 years hardly anyone is able to agree on just what this law requires – even as the supporting political constituency known as “the disabled” continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

The Justice Department has just proposed adding 1,000 pages of new regulations to help “clarify” what the ADA requires, in America’s ongoing efforts to provide equal access for “the disabled.”

But who are “the disabled”? That “protected” class long ago expanded beyond the deaf, the blind, and those who rely on wheelchairs. The Census Bureau now claims there are more than 51 million disabled Americans, representing 18 percent of the population. Does one in six of your fellow Americans look “disabled” to you?

Few can object to the original stated purpose of the Act. If a few inexpensive adaptations at the library or the bookstore can make it easier for a blind person or a person in a wheelchair to get around and participate in the nation’s commerce, most Americans are happy to cooperate.

But when there are government benefits available to anyone who can get their problem classified as a “legal disability,” it’s no surprise lobbying pressure has been applied to get everything from alcoholism to depression to the inability to have sex qualified for a “disability” check – and some special provision in the regulations.

Imagine: a thousand pages of new regulations, obedience to which could cost 7 million affected businesses plus state and local government agencies $23 billion over the next 40 years, according to the Justice Department – which hasn’t factored in the cost of defending against litigation from those who argue the new rules “still don’t go far enough,” of whom there are plenty.

“We have a very mixed sense of what’s happened,” explains Curtis Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network. “They left a lot of things unanswered.”

For instance, the new rules still don’t do enough to address ticket fraud, information technology – such as check-in kiosks at hotels or airports – and closed-captioning at movie theaters, “disability advocates” told The Associated Press last week.

Oh goody. Run and tell the trial bar.

In fact, I’ll bet, right here and now, that there’ll even be a lawsuit about the new “service animals” provision: dogs are in, see; monkeys out.

Among the millions of businesses and other public facilities that would be affected by the proposed regulatory changes? Courthouses, drinking fountains, amusement park rides, stadium and theater seating, fishing piers, boat slips, bowling lanes – even miniature golf courses, where 50 percent of the holes will now have to be accessible for players in wheelchairs, unaided by monkeys.

(I am not, as Dave Barry used to say, making this up.)

The rules supposedly apply only to new businesses and facilities and to alterations to existing ones. But existing businesses would also have to remove “readily achievable” barriers – changes that the bureaucrats figure won’t require a lot of difficulty or expense – right away.

There’s also supposed to be a “safe harbor” provision that would hold small businesses have met their obligation to remove barriers in a given year if, in the preceding year, they spent at least 1 percent of their gross revenues on barrier removal.

But the extremists don’t like that.

“We are worried about people claiming ‘We did this, this and this, we renovated the bathroom on the second floor’ but you still can’t get in the three steps at the front door,” complains Kleo King, senior vice president of accessibility services at the United Spinal Association. “There’s too much room for abuse here.”

Note Ms. King has just applied the term “abuse” not to government regulators who have now generated another 1,000 pages of rules – rules of which “ignorance is no excuse” – but rather to business owners and facility managers trying to hold proponents to their initial promise, all those years ago, that the ADA would require only “a few reasonable, inexpensive accommodations.”

But why the concern? Businesses will actually profit from these new requirements, proponents argue, thanks to all the new income from handicapped customers.

Yeah. And NASA paid back every penny of our taxpayer “investment” by giving us “Tang.”

August 2, 2008

Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow.

Copyright © 2008 Vin Suprynowicz

Vin Suprynowicz Archives