The ADA has been in place 27 years. It was landmark legislation, protecting the rights of people with disabilities in a way that reshaped businesses and communities. “Is this accessible?” became a key question asked around all design efforts, to make sure that all people can get to the places they work, the places they shop, and their community as a whole.
Yet despite its great success (and extensive consultation and compromise with the business community during its drafting), certain groups have always hated the added expense and effort around new construction and remediation, especially having to do so proactively. So we now have HR 620, the “ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017”. It has a variety of provisions, but a key one is that, under Title III, businesses(“public accommodations”) wouldn’t have to do a bloody thing about accessibility until they were (1) informed of the matter by someone with a complaint, in detail as to precisely what provisions of the bill they were in violation of, (2) the businesses had a chance to respond with a plan, (3) the plan didn’t show “sufficient progress” for six months (an interval the business can extend just by arguing it is making “sufficient progress” as opposed to actually providing access).
Unlike the present ADA — or civil rights legislation dating back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — people could no longer sue in the face of a violation to force a business to actively respond, but would have to go through an elaborate rigmarole of notifications and counter-notifications and plans making “substantial progress,” which all sounds very nice and polite, but means accessibility problems go unabated through that time. As a result, businesses could easily just shrug off accessibility issues until someone actually, formally complained, and only then start the process of showing “substantial progress” over months or years to fix the problem.
(Worse, it essentially punishes business that do go to the expense of proactively ensuring their services are accessible, by letting others skate by without compliance.)
The bill also seems to encourage the setup of arbitration (“alternative dispute resolution mechanisms”) to resolve such matters, rather than using the courts. While, again, that sounds like an increased efficiency, such arbitration proceedings tend to lean toward the business interests in the matter. And there are concerns that, if the ADA can be changed this way, then other civil right legislation might be similarly hamstrung.
While there are a lot of reasons given and misrepresentations of HR 620, it’s worth noting that a substantial amount of its support in Congress comes from both sides of the aisle, largely at the behest of a broad array of business interests that have a high stake in being able to make ADA compliance voluntary-until-notified, usually with the argument that the current setup, after almost three decades, allows too many frivolous law suits. It’s definitely worth a holler at your own representative, whatever the party, to confirm their stance on this legislation, and make sure they aren’t buying into that position.
