This week was the 5 year anniversary of the installation of our "$10,000 Monument to Government Stupidity" -- a pool lift -- after settling a bogus ADA lawsuit out of court, and the rage I feel at the memory of this travesty is just as strong as the day it happened.
Therefore, this topic is sadly familiar to me, and I'm sorry that our friend Bryan is going through it. Just to recap, here's what happened to us:
In 2014, a legless Iraqi war veteran had a nice girl call 79 hotels in South Texas. Her job was to ask one question: "Do you have a handicapped pool lift in your swimming pool?"
When our part-time desk staff answered "Huh?", they thanked her, hung up -- and four days later we received a 2" thick packet from circuit court in Dallas, telling us that we were being sued for violating the Americans With Disabilities Act. This happened to the 78 other hotels, too.
Of course, my first call was to our best lawyer Spike, whose sage advice (and I paraphrase) went something like this: "Yes, this new ADA requirement is a pain, but the law is written so that you could win this case. Your hotel is grandfathered, having been built long before ADA, and compliance will present a major financial hardship. It's also illegal for this guy to be making an industry out of suing hotels."
I thought "Great! We're gonna kick this guy's ASS."
Then Spike continued: "HOWEVER, it will cost a lot of money to fight him, and you still might lose. It's probably less risky in the long run to pursue settling out of court."
This advice caused me great consternation. Every instinct in my body said to FIGHT. I wanted to fly to Minnesota to personally kick the guy's ass, I was so angry. The guy had NEVER set foot in my hotel. In fact, he had never set foot in Texas! EVERYTHING about this lawsuit was stupid, unfair, un-American, and just plain WRONG.
In the end, my lovely wife talked me back from the ledge, and we agreed to pursue a settlement. Because we were so small, and Spike was so persuasive, our legless vet was willing to accept "only" $3000 damages, plus we had to install a pool lift. I agreed.
So did 78 other hotels in South Texas. Our legless vet had himself quite a little payday.
To install the pool lift meant digging up the pool deck, since the concrete was never designed to support a 350 pound walrus on a chair lift at the end of an arm suspended over water. So the concrete work was extensive -- an 8" pour -- and the end cost was $10,000 for the lift. With his settlement, Mary and I had to cough up $13,000 to make this guy go away.
My stomach knots and my teeth grind just to type that!
What makes this law especially onerous is that the lift must, by law, be used by the crippled person WITHOUT assistance. This means it must be fully autonomous, which means we can't help them. Worse, in a salt environment, keeping it operational is almost impossible. Just keeping the battery charged is tough, and fighting the corrosion is a daily issue.
To this day, five years later, the lift has never been used by a handicapped person. In fact, the ONLY person to have used it, to our knowledge, was a drunk guy who rode it out and used it as a diving board. We've got him on video.
So in the end, this lift isn't merely useless -- it actually presents a clear and present risk to my hotel, as it is far more likely to be abused than used. Someday someone will break their neck on it, and we will be sued for THAT.
Good luck, Bryan. ADA is the most abused law every written -- but no Congress critter wants to be seen on TV going up against a poor, helpless, legless Iraqi war veteran on the floor of the Senate -- so we are stuck with it.
Just drop your shorts, open your wallet, and say "ahhh!"... :-(
