REGIONAL REPORT : Accessible Transit for the Disabled--How to Pay for It?

Brad Mills broke his neck last year diving into a lake. Now he’s a 24-year-old quadriplegic, living at the Winners Rehabilitation Center in Paramount, adjusting to life in a wheelchair.

Scooting about town--to the doctor’s, the movies and the beach--almost always means public transportation. But sometimes, Mills said, the bus doesn’t have a wheelchair lift. A couple of weeks ago, a bus driver “looked me right in the eye and pulled away,” not wanting to bother with the lift. And, he said, a city-run dial-a-ride van service isn’t consistently available.

It’s all so frustrating, Mills said. “It makes life a lot better when you can get out and about and live it, rather than sitting about the house all day,” he said.

A year ago today, President Bush signed a federal civil rights bill aimed at providing equal access to jobs, public facilities and public transit to disabled people like Mills. Rallies and hearings at the White House and at Los Angeles City Hall are set to mark the anniversary of a law touted as an “emancipation proclamation” for the disabled.

But in transit agencies around Southern California, the focus is not on the law’s admirable intent. Instead, planners said, it’s on how to provide the disabled with a level of service “comparable” to that available to the general public--which will take millions of dollars transit officials said they don’t have.

The law addresses the needs of the disabled on many fronts: It bans job discrimination because of disabilities and requires employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for those with handicaps. It says public accommodations must be made accessible to the disabled--not just restaurants and hotels, but museums, stadiums and the barbershop.

But the rule that seems to be generating significant concern has to do with transit accessibility. Financially strapped transit planners said that expanding or creating new service promises to have a hefty financial effect--without any guarantee of federal funds.

Los Angeles transit officials said they are trying to keep the cost of providing the added services the law requires at $30 million yearly.

In Ventura County, it could take a full third of one transit agency’s $6-million budget. In San Diego County, Chula Vista transit officials said they haven’t even attempted a financial reckoning because the law’s particulars seem so daunting.

“The way the law is written, it’s way impossible . . . to implement it,” said Greg Alabado, of the Chula Vista agency.

Advocates for the disabled, however, said the cost, whatever it turns out be, is worth it.

“Disabled people have the right to see the same bad movies and eat in the same rotten restaurants as everyone else,” said Patrisha Wright, governmental affairs director for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund Inc. in Washington. “That’s the key to this act.”

At a hearing today in Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley, hearing-impaired actress Marlee Matlin and several activists for disabled rights are scheduled to talk about the law’s lofty goals. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), sponsor of the measure, formally called the Americans with Disabilities Act, is due to preside.

Another focus of the hearing will be identifying roadblocks to implementing the law, Harkin’s aides said in phone calls this week. In general, much of the law will not actually become effective until next January.

For months now, though, transit officials have been wrestling with the new rules.

And the one that is causing the most concern, transit officials said, has to do with what’s called “paratransit,” the dial-a-ride shuttles that provide door-to-door service for people unable to ride a regular bus--for instance, a blind person who can ride the bus to work and back but is unfamiliar with bus stops to and from an alternate site.

The law requires any transit agency that runs a regular bus route to provide such shuttle service on demand, during the same hours the buses run. The service will cost more than regular bus fare but transit officials said even the increased fares won’t cover operating costs. And they lamented the lack of federal funding to pay for the new or expanded routes.

In Los Angeles, about 310 agencies, some municipal and some private, currently spend $70 million annually to run van shuttles with overlapping routes, said Richard DeRock, an administrator at the county Transportation Commission, the agency that funnels funding to the van operators.

Rough estimates are that it could cost $100 million a year extra, for a total of $170 million, to comply with the new law, if no changes were made in the routes or service areas, DeRock said. However, the commission intends to coordinate all 310 services into a regional service, which has never been done before. With less overlap, the cost increase would be only $30 million a year, or $100 million total, he said.

In Ventura County, South Coast Area Transit has no existing service to cobble together. It will have to start a paratransit system from scratch, said Maureen Lopez, director of planning. The agency serves Ventura, Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula and Ojai.

Estimates are that it will cost as much as $2 million a year to run a dial-a-ride program, which would amount to 33% of South Coast Area Transit’s $6-million annual budget, Lopez said. The agency does not have that kind of cash, she said, adding, “We are in a bind.”

The Riverside Transit Agency estimates that it will cost $1.5 million annually to supplement its 56-bus fleet, most of it for new service among contract vans along 20% of its routes, said agency planner Barbara Bray. That would be 12% of the agency’s fiscal 1992 budget, $12.1 million, she said.

“It’s a major challenge,” Bray said.

Looking at the Law

The Americans With Disabilities Act, signed into law July 26, 1990, bars discrimination in employment, public transit and public accommodations. Among its provisions, which will be phased in beginning in January: TRANSPORTATION

Door-to-door shuttles must be provided to people who cannot ride a bus. The shuttles must provide service comparable to regular transit agency bus lines. PUBLIC ACCOMMODATIONS

New and renovated retail facilities must be accessible to the disabled, and “readily achievable” modifications--such as ramps--must be made to existing establishments. Facilities include inns, restaurants, movie theaters, shopping centers, funeral parlors, gas stations, museums, schools and health spas. EMPLOYMENT

Employers may not discriminate against the disabled in hiring, and must make “reasonable accommodations” for the handicapped.