[at-l] New Reservation System at Katahdin

[jbullar1 at twcny.rr.com (Jim Bullard)]

Sorry but the argument that a few people's bad attitude justifies bad 
public policy doesn't cut it for me. That's the same illogic that justifies 
the 'all people on welfare are just lazy' and the famous Reagan quote that 
'homeless people have homes to go to but find it easier to eat in soup 
kitchens'. I don't buy into the public servants stereotypes anymore than I 
do the welfare ones or the disabled ones. I *was* a public servant for 30 
years and know the difficulties of doing things in a way that pleases 
everyone involved.

FWIW in one of the offices I supervised I had an employee who was 
wheelchair bound and constantly complaining about access at the workplace. 
Occasionally he had a genuine point and I did my best  but getting things 
fixed was never instantaneous. Getting contractors often means waiting your 
turn (they have other customers who need things done yesterday too) and 
sometimes he wanted changes to things that already met the requirements of 
the law (makes it real hard to justify to bean counters who control the 
money). Again I did my best but he was still unhappy with me when I retired 
because I simply could not give him everything he wanted.

The same was true of the non-disabled employees BTW. We had moved from a 
larger space that was all ours to a smaller one that we shared with other 
agencies. It was all in accord with the space requirements but nobody was 
happy and nothing I could do was about to make them happy. I wound up in 
the hospital with stress attacks trying to keep them all happy and/or 
motivate a bunch of unhappy people to do their jobs instead of sitting like 
lumps with their lower lips hanging out. I ended up making myself happy by 
retiring. The disabled employee also retired (on my advice) shortly after I 
did and the last I knew the rest were still unhappy.

In my experience most businesses and public places were willing to make a 
good faith effort to provide access and the best weapon against those who 
were not was not a more stringent law or over-the-top enforcement (they 
were ignoring law already) but to make it a media issue and publicly 
embarrass them. Public or private, they are all sensitive to dents in their 
public image.

At 09:50 PM 12/26/2004 -0800, william fitzpatrick wrote:
>Yup, you're right about the "no exceptions" phrase, and also about how it
>really doesn't make sense in (probably) most cases.
>
>First, I doubt that the law covers the actual trails in parks, just the public
>buildings on them.  I suppose we can expect some extremists somewhere to 
>demand
>handicapped access privies.  No one demanded a smoother trail to Galehead.
>(Well, except me--that whole section wore me out!)
>
>Second, as I said, this isn't about common sense or "spirit."  It's about
>getting something done without doing perpetual hand-to-hand combat with those
>who would, if allowed, simply refuse service to people with broken bones or
>medical conditions.
>
>My attitude on this comes from the troubles people have gotten into with 
>things
>like voting rights legislation and anti-discrimination laws: there are people
>who absolutely will not obey the "spirit" of such laws and will do their
>darndest to find a loophole: any loophole, no matter what they have to do to
>manufacture said loophole.
>
>As I said earlier, we had people lying down in the streets in front of city
>busses to protest the "unequal" system of transportation.  I, personally would
>have loved to have the alternate system in place at the time for my use--they
>didn't agree and forced RTD to equip all the busses with chair lifts and then,
>when it turned out that the lifts didn't seem to work very often to MAKE them
>work.
>
>It's part of my point that when they did install lifts, they were not
>maintained.  People on all sides of almost any question can be truly
>uncooperative when they set their minds to it.  Seems to me I saw something on
>TV about just how few public venues have been modified--there's never quite
>enough money to do that.
>
>Life is hard, extreme views make it harder.  As I indicated, sometimes it's a
>whole lot cheaper to build a wheelchair ramp (and then point out just how
>expensive and useless it is) than to fight endless battles with
>dogs-in-the-manger who just want to make a lot of noise.
>
>--- Jim Bullard <jbullar1@twcny.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > At 03:17 PM 12/26/2004 -0800, william fitzpatrick wrote:
> > >Somebody said:
> > >"       Galehead is a perfect example of (excuse me for this) head up the
> > ass
> > >federalism..."
> > >
> > >Nope.  Galehead is a perfect example of the lengths some people will go to
> > >avoid doing the right thing.
> > >If you make a law that will cost some people money, they will try to get
> > >around
> > >it.  If you write exceptions into that law, you'll end up spending a 
> LOT of
> > >time in court trying to prove that this or that idiot really doesn't 
> qualify
> > >for his interpretation of the exception that would save him a few bucks.
> > >
> > >The way around it is to write the law with NO exceptions.  It's a 
> matter of
> > >practicality and enforcement rather than one of common sense--cheap jerks
> > >don't
> > >care about common sense, they just want to save their money, no matter who
> > it
> > >hurts, or how much it hurts anyone else.
> >
> > NO EXCEPTIONS would mean that every hiking trail in the land, including 
> the
> > AT from end-to-end, would have to be graded and paved to wheelchair
> > standards and all the shelters and privies would be wheelchair accessible.
> > They'd probably have to install wheelchair lifts on Katahdin and several
> > other places where sufficient grading would be impossible. Every stream
> > would have to be bridged and fords that couldn't be bridged would have to
> > have ferry service that could handle wheelchairs. That's what "no
> > exceptions" would mean.
> >
> > The handicap access installed at Galehead is an example of the silliness
> > that "no exceptions" would result in. It's there because some people who
> > wanted to make a point *carried* a handicapped individual and his
> > wheelchair up the mountain *one time* solely to demonstrate that it was
> > *possible* for a handicapped person to get there therefore handicapped
> > access to the hut was necessary. I don't know for sure but I'd be willing
> > to wager that no other wheelchair bound individual has ever presented
> > him/herself for entrance to Galehead Hut. The extra money spent making the
> > hut handicap accessible would have been better spent on other projects.
> >
> > A few individuals have misconstrued the intent of the law to imply that
> > handicapped individuals should be enabled to go anywhere and do anything
> > that anyone else can. What was actually intended was that handicapped
> > should be able to access the halls of government and the places that an
> > *ordinary* individual does in the process of *ordinary* living, things 
> like
> > schools, libraries, supermarkets, theaters, etc. It was not intended to
> > enable quadriplegics to become mountain climbers.
> >
> > Laws should rectify the inequities they were *intended* to. That's what is
> > meant by the "spirit of the law". A law which applies absolutely to every
> > situation can create new problems where none existed.
> >
> >
>
>
>=====
>Want to be respected?  Be respectable.
>JestBill  Ga--->Me '03
>
>
>
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