Negligent Public Officials

Negligent Public Officials

[This letter was published in the Boston Herald on August 30, 2007]

It is curious that 34 years after the Rehabilitation Act and 17 years after
the Americans with Disabilities Act became law, a state agency forces a city
government to comply with basic access to the right to travel. (Marie Szaniszlo,
"Disabled rip Hub’s $320G sidewalk," Boston Herald, August 26, 2007) The many
years of the violations of that right for thousands of Boston citizens and
visitors remain unaddressed.
The City's liberal leaders focus on providing goods and services to illegal
aliens while American citizens with disabilities cannot use the sidewalks. Again
taxpayers pay for the negligence, wrongdoing and malfeasance of public
officials. Is this a hypocrisy or a democracy? The hackarama is the "Spending
Other People's Money Society."

--
Roy Bercaw, Editor, ENOUGH ROOM

Disabled rip Hub’s $320G sidewalk
By Marie Szaniszlo
Boston Herald
Sunday, August 26, 2007 - Updated: 01:28 AM EST

Meet the most expensive patch of sidewalk in Boston: $320,000 and counting.
The state Department of Public Safety’s Architectural Access Board has
fined the Hub $500 a day since Nov. 30, 2005, for an uneven, sloping stretch of
brick on Huntington Avenue, part of what advocates for the disabled denounce as
a pattern of violations in the city that puts them at risk.
“The irony is if the city had just made sure the sidewalk was repaired
the right way in the beginning, it would have cost taxpayers a fraction of that
amount and people like me who use wheelchairs wouldn’t have to risk getting
hit by a car by riding in the street,” said John Kelly of the Neighborhood
Access Group, which filed the complaint with the board.
Advocates note that under state law, the horizontal slope of a sidewalk
cannot be more than 2 percent; in some spots, the slope of the 4-year-old
Huntington Avenue sidewalk is 4.5 percent. That can send wheelchairs tipping
over or sliding toward the street.
“The continued dangerousness of this bumpy all-brick sidewalk has these
past four years been torturing the hundreds of elderly and disabled people
living next door at Symphony Plaza,” the Boston Center for Independent Living,
the Disability Policy Consortium and the Neighborhood Access group wrote in a
July 26 letter to Public Works and Transportation chief Dennis Royer.
Royer did not respond to the letter until Aug. 17, when the Herald
contacted Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s office, which released a statement in which
Royer said he planned to meet with the three groups.
“I take all complaints about the quality of access in and around our city
for mobility-impaired residents and visitors very seriously,” Menino said in a
statement Friday. “I’ve told the Department of Public Works to make these
complaints a top priority and to find short and long-term solutions to make our
city’s streets and sidewalks safe and accessible for everyone.”
So far this year, the Architectural Access Board has received 106
complaints about other Boston sidewalks and curb cuts that allegedly violate
state access code, according to the board’s director, Thomas Hopkins. None has
yet resulted in a fine.
Advocates note there has been progress in disability access in the Hub.
After a 2006 legal settlement, the MBTA undertook major improvements in
equipment, facilities and services, including the installation of new elevators
and bus ramps. Gary Talbot, assistant to the general manager for system-wide
accessibility, and General Manager Dan Grabauskas have earned high praise from
advocates.
But off the T, critics say, many of the most important civic buildings and
institutions in “America’s Walking City” remain off-limits to the disabled
because of inaccessible travel paths.
The state Attorney General’s Office has not sought to enforce the fines
for the Huntington Avenue sidewalk, a spokeswoman said, because the city is
expected to dispute them at an Aug. 30 hearing in Suffolk Superior Court.
The city is expected to claim that although it owns most of the sidewalk,
the MBTA and Massachusetts Highway Department oversaw its construction.
The state access board also has slapped the city with a $5,000 fine for
failing to maintain an accessible route on Huntington Avenue during
construction.
On Thursday, all three agencies said they would work together to make the
sidewalk accessible but would not say when.
“If we can’t even use a sidewalk, that’s a basic right,” said Karen
Schneiderman of the Boston Center for Independent Living, “and we pay taxes.”