Good morning members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution. I am honored to be
here this morning. I learned of this bill last week from an email that was sent
to my mom and dad. The American s with Disabilities Act has been in place for 10
years on July 27, 2000. When my grandpa died last year and I went to the funeral
I had to be carried up and down the steps because the funeral home was not
accessible. My family talked with the funeral director and told him about the
ADA and how he was violating my civil rights by his building not being
accessible. He promised that he would make it accessible. My grandma went and
checked on this a few months later to make sure the funeral director kept his
word, and he did. He installed a lift so that other people who use wheelchairs
would not have to be carried up the steps.
I feel that this bill that Mr. Eastwood is lobbying for is a bill that was
designed to weaken the ADA and take away the civil rights of people with
disabilities. Doesn’t he understand that the ADA has been in place for 10
years and that if you renovate a building you must make it accessible to people
with disabilities? He failed to do that and now wants the Congress to support
him in his failure to comply with a law that is clearly written. He says that
the sleazy lawyers that file these so called "frivolous" lawsuits are
in collusion with people with disabilities. This is not the case! There are no
money damages for individual plaintiffs under title III of the ADA, and the only
financial incentive for businesses to address accessibility issues is the threat
of having to pay the plaintiffs attorneys fees. Many people with disabilities
hire lawyers to sue people who fail to make their place of business accessible.
Many people with disabilities file their own pro-se law suits against businesses
that fail to make their buildings accessible. It is people with disabilities,
whom Mr. Eastwood refers to as "people who can’t defend themselves,"
that hire lawyers and file law suits for violations of the ADA regulations, in
fact it is the most effective way that people with disabilities have to defend
their civil rights in a society that does not accept them as equal. Mr. Eastwood
had the opportunity to comply and choose to fight the case and lost. That’s
his motive for being here today. Many small and large businesses already have
voluntarily complied with the law. This bill would reward those who only will
comply when threatened with a lawsuit.
It is not right that I should be excluded from someplace simply because the
owner fails to think about "ALL" the people that may visit their place
of business. If my school wasn’t accessible I should have to wait for 90 days
for them to decide whether or not they want to make it accessible? Why should my
education be put on hold while they decide to make the building accessible. It’s
already bad enough when I go on field trips with my school. I always have to be
segregated from my classmates to enter the building that we are visiting. This
bill is something that will make it virtually impossible to impose any kind of
violations against the businesses that disregard the ADA by building buildings
that I cannot get into. Why are people with disabilities singled out as the only
class required to give advance notification of their violation of civil rights?
I’m a member of the public and I have rights too!