Tomorrow is a deadline that looms large for worried pool operators at hotels and public recreation facilities across the country, as USA Today reports:
Hoteliers must have pool lifts to provide disabled people equal access to pools and whirlpools, or at least have a plan in place to acquire a lift. If they don’t, they face possible civil penalties of as much as $55,000.
As Conn Carroll at the Washington Examiner explains, the mandate has taken an even more irrational form than might have been expected. Because the elevator lifts are space-consuming, unsightly, potential hazards to curious children, and unlikely to be used very often, many pool operators assumed it would be enough to purchase a portable lift that could be wheeled over to poolside on user request and stored when not in use. No such luck: the Obama administration has announced that the lifts must not only be of permanent construction, but must apply to each separate “water feature”, so that a pool with adjoining spa would need two of them. “Each lift costs between $3,000 and $10,000 and installation can add $5,000 to $10,000 to the total.” Many budget hostelries are expected to simply shutter their pools until further notice rather than take the risk that entrepreneurial fast-buck artists will begin filing complaints against them for cash settlements, as in California’s notorious ADA filing mills.
I think Carroll probably goes too far when he suggests that the Obama administration made the rules unreasonable in order to give its friends in the ADA bar more litigation to file. The problem is more that this administration (and not just this one) has outsourced its thinking on the law to advocates in the legal academia-disabled rights-“public interest law” community, which tends to embrace interpretations and applications of the law geared to advance ambitious versions of social change. In the pool case, the federal appointee in charge (according to this blog post) was Samuel Bagenstos, who after his stint in the Obama Justice Department has now returned to legal academia, where he is perhaps the leading proponent of expansive ADA interpretation. (His view of abusive ADA suits – he puts the term “abusive” in quotation marks – is here.) Academia’s other best-known advocate of an expansively interpreted ADA (and a drafter of the law) is Chai Feldblum of Georgetown Law, who serves the Obama administration as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Don’t look to Republicans for relief on this. The Bush administrations both pere et fils were consistently wretched on it, and a large bloc of GOP members of Congress predictably joins the Democrats in opposing legislative ideas for even modest rollback of the ADA’s most extreme applications.
