Ramping up a cause in S.F.

Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier sits in this city’s ornate board chambers and gazes up a steep set of stairs leading to the president’s speaking dais.

“Five stairs,” she says quietly. “That’s the mountain.”

Alioto-Pier, 39, has been paralyzed from the waist down since a childhood skiing accident. But her disability hasn’t kept the scion of one of the city’s most powerful political families from public service -- following her grandfather, former Mayor Joseph Alioto, and her aunt Angela Alioto, a past president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

A supervisor herself since 2004 -- the first to use a wheelchair -- Alioto-Pier has become an advocate for the city’s 150,000 disabled residents. She’s helped make elections accessible to the blind and assisted voters who have manual dexterity problems. Residents with disabilities turn to her office for help.

Now the battle is personal.

Last month, the board in a 6-5 vote rejected plans to build a wheelchair ramp to the circa-1915 podium, fashioned from rare Manchurian oak. Board critics contended that money for the project, which they estimated at costing $1.1 million because of architectural considerations involving the historic chamber, could be better spent on other services, rather than the benefit of a single politician.

Board opponents bemoaned the city’s “liberal guilt.” One said the issue was being “rammed down his throat.”

Alioto-Pier, who is supported by Mayor Gavin Newsom and disability activists, said the 10-foot ramp’s actual cost would be about $100,000, plus $40,000 more for a railing -- a fraction of her opponents’ claim. The rest of the $1.1-million price tag would include other upgrades.

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.”

Board President Aaron Peskin said he never uses the speaker’s dais, preferring the lower clerk’s podium where he is nearly eye-level with fellow supervisors.

“It’s no big deal to descend from the exalted president’s podium,” he said.

He proposed making the lower seat the permanent president’s dais, where a temporary ramp already in place could be modified at little cost.

“There are ways to satisfy everyone without spending a lot of money,” he said.

The public face-off has prompted debate in this city that has championed such causes as same-sex marriage and has an appointed disability rights czar.

When it comes to equal access, some ask, how much is enough?

Outside City Hall, Fran Peavey, who is disabled, called the city’s stand “disgusting.”

“If any one of us aren’t allowed to get up there and speak,” she said of the dais, “we’re all kept quiet.”

Joanne Schivley, a City Council member in nearby Vallejo who uses a wheelchair, isn’t so sure.

“If this were an area that is used all the time I would say yes, but since it isn’t, I have doubts,” she said. “Especially when money is tight and the advantage is for such a small number of people.”

Alioto-Pier said officials had no problem spending $317 million on a 1990 City Hall upgrade that included numerous improvements for access for the disabled. Or $3 million to later gild the City Hall dome. The city, she said, would spend far more defending a lawsuit than for building a ramp.

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.”

Activists say Alioto-Pier has become a scapegoat.

“It’s a classic case of blaming the victim, making the disabled person feel guilty to ask the city to comply with its legal obligations,” said Larry Paradis, executive director of the Bay Area-based Disability Rights Advocates. “That this is all about one person is nonsense.”

Alioto-Pier, a mother of three who uses a self-powered chair and drives a vehicle with hand-operated brakes and accelerator, does not view herself as disabled. While she talks, she absent-mindedly tips her chair up on one wheel, leaning against a table.

“You forget she’s in a wheelchair,” said one aide, “until she’s late for a meeting and jams down the hallway and you can’t keep up with her.”

Alioto-Pier recalls that her high school in San Francisco installed an access ramp shortly after her 1981 accident, in which a ski lift cable came loose from the guide pole, sending her chair 50 feet to the ground.

She saw how an institution could work to accommodate the disabled. That lesson came into play years later at -- of all places -- the White House.

As an advisor to Gore, she found that the West Wing, including the Situation Room where he often worked, had stairs that were inaccessible for wheelchairs. That’s when she threw a self-described “hissy fit.”

Staff members told her the White House wasn’t legally required to make changes, so she had her lawyers prepare a lawsuit. Six months and $150,000 later, she got her way.

The White House experience helped launch Alioto-Pier’s political career. In 1996, she spoke before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to second Gore’s nomination as vice president. She narrowly lost races for Congress in 1998 and for California secretary of state in 1998 before becoming a San Francisco supervisor.

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.”

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john.glionna@latimes.com