Separate but Equal in San Francisco?
The City by the Bay has a reputation for being a bastion of progressive politics, but you wouldn’t know it from the fight my dear friend Michela Alioto-Pier is having trying to make the board chamber wheelchair-accessible. John M. Glionna of the LA Times has the story:
What message, Alioto-Pier asked, does it send the disabled when the city’s highest perch of power is inaccessible to someone in a wheelchair?
She has promised to sue the city for its alleged violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. And it wouldn’t be the first time she’s made such a threat: In 1993, as a domestic policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore, she successfully fought for wheelchair access to the White House.
Once you’ve taken on the West Wing Situation Room, she figured, it’s all downhill from there.
“This is worth the battle because it’s the law,” she said. “I don’t want to spend money that shouldn’t be spent. But if I need to get a judge to tell San Francisco what it should be doing, I’ll do it.”
…
[Mayor Gavin] Newsom chastised supervisors for requiring businesses to conform to state and federal disability access laws but acting as though they can ignore the laws themselves.
“This is demeaning to Michela and other disabled residents and I’m saddened by it,” he said. “Believe me, this ramp will be built.”
…
[Supervisor Aaron] Peskin suggested that supervisors could vote to permanently close off the president’s podium “as an artistic remnant of the way the city used to do business,” he said. “The sum cost to the city: zero.”
Alioto-Pier isn’t buying it. “After civil rights was achieved in the South, did they keep the separate black and white water fountains as a monument to the way we used to do business?” she said. “Implementing civil rights laws is never easy. But it’s worth it in the end.”
Don’t mess with Michela.
