From the USA Today (ht: Overlawyered):
Hoteliers must have pool lifts to provide disabled people equal access to pools and whirlpools, or at least have a plan in place to acquire a lift. If they don’t, they face possible civil penalties of as much as $55,000.
But hey, this sort of thing creates jobs, right?
In other news, I thought the punchline here would have been, “they decided to eliminate the program.” National transportation planning. Yep. That’s a swell idea.
To my regret, as an unelected member of our local planning commission, I was cowed by our unelected but paid lawyer to recommend an ordinance to impose handicapped everything on anyone who might decide to build anything that might be called a business, because somebody he said he knew had a crippled nice grandmother. Who was I to make a federal case to hurt cripples? You want to hurt grandmothers, huh?
The same argument is made about making sure that crippled grandmothers get hoisted into the whirlpool at the Holiday Inn Express on the trip down to Florida. It is someone else’s job to buy the apparatus, as opposed to buying grandmother a first-class ticket in a bulkhead seat on her trip to Boca Raton. If that raises the cost of a hotel room for, ew, business travelers, well, let them get their, ew, employers kick in their excess money, because they can afford it, right?
Take this tack at a dinner party, and it is not likely one will be reinvited, but then we all overeat, right?
“They’ve had quite a bit of time to do their planning,” says Eve Hill, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “If they have legitimate reasons in good faith that they can’t comply, then that will be taken into account.”
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Wait a minute, what kind of crap is that? Is it a law, or regulation or mandate or isn’t it? So bureaucrat Eve, or one of her civil service elves, gets to decide if the No-Tell Motel is in compliance or not? Like a prosecutor or judge or jury? I thought this democracy thing was all about the rule of law not man.
This is beyond insidious. If after a certain date, owners are in violation, they should, as the law states, be arrested, prosecuted, jailed and fined. All of them. Then their families, relatives and friends can march on Eve Hill’s office, pitchforks and torches in hand, and demand a return to reality. The powerful but gutless Feds aren’t going to invite that kind of response, however. But they’re not going to change the law, either.
Hey, Chuck, don’t worry. The township’s zealous engineer will make sure any duplicative local regulations are enforced.
Just think, this will do away with all the cheap motels out there. They still might be stinky, slimy and inviting to insects, but your No Tell Motel will not be cheap. Maybe they can put a mirror over the hoist.