Boston Fined $376,000 for Inaccessible sidewalks

Boston Fined $376,000 for Inaccessible sidewalks

[This letter was published in the Boston Herald on December 31, 2007.]

The Rehabilitation Act was passed in 1973. It applies to Boston which gets
US
taxpayer funds. The $376,000 fine is chump change. (Marie Szaniszlo, "Judge
upholds fines vs. Hub, Boston Herald, December 23, 2007) The sidewalks have not
been accessible for 34 years violating the basic Right to Travel for all those
years.
Where were all of the taxpayer funded lawyers who are
supposed to assert the rights of persons with disabilities? That includes the
Disability Law Center, the Mass Office on Disabilities, the MA Attorney
General's Disability Rights Division. What are they doing for their $100,000
salaries?

Roy Bercaw, Editor ENOUGH ROOM

Judge upholds fines vs. Hub
$376G later, sidewalk still unfixed
By Marie Szaniszlo
Boston Herald
Sunday, December 23, 2007

A Superior Court judge has upheld a state agency’s $500-a-day fine against the
city of Boston for failing to make a sidewalk accessible to people with
disabilities.

The board has fined the Hub $500 a day since Nov. 30, 2005, for its failure to
correct the violation. Since then, the city has accruedmore than $376,000 in
fines, making the section of Huntington Avenue the city’s most expensive
sidewalk.

“I’m really gratified the judge found the city’s arguments weak and easily
dismissable,” said John B. Kelly of the Neighborhood Access Group, who spent
yesterday trying to navigate the Hub’s icy byways. “The court’s decision exposes
the city as a two-year-long scofflaw.”

Dot Joyce, spokeswoman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, yesterday said: “Our
Department of Public Works continues to work with Mr. Kelly and his group and we
continue to listen to them for guidance about which streets need to be fixed.”

In a recent 10-page decision, Justice Paul E. Troy found the city had failed to
show that a decision by the Architectural Access Board was “not based on
substantial evidence” that an uneven, sloping stretch of brick on Huntington
Avenue violates state law.

The horizontal slope of a sidewalk must not exceed 2 percent. But in some spots,
the slope of the 4-year-old Huntington Avenue sidewalk is 4.5 percent - enough
to send Kelly and others who use wheelchairs tipping over, he said, or sliding
into the street.

The city claimed that although it owns most of the sidewalk, the MBTA and
Massachusetts Highway Department oversaw its construction.

Earlier this year, all three agencies said they would work together to make the
sidewalk accessible but would not say when.

The sidewalk is part of what Kelly and other advocates for the disabled denounce
as a pattern of violations in the city that puts them at risk, particularly at
this time of year.

So many sidewalks have gone unshovelled, Kelly said, that he and other
wheelchair-users are forced to remain home or take their chances dodging cars in
the street.

“To be quarantined because we apparently don’t count is demoralizing,” Kelly
said. “What kind of city forces people to resign themselves to that?”
Article URL:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1062343