COUNTYWIDE : Rehabilitation Chief Says Law Not Costly

Fears that local businesses will be forced to spend thousands of dollars to comply with the recently enacted Americans with Disabilities Act are unfounded, California’s rehabilitation chief said Friday.

William E. Tainter, director of the state Department of Rehabilitation, said the average company will have to spend about $500 to meet the law’s primary requirement that buildings be accessible to the disabled. The act also bans discrimination against the disabled.

Tainter, 49, was in Orange County on Friday to visit counselors for the disabled and tour the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled in Garden Grove.

“People think the Americans with Disabilities Act is going to be costly and time-consuming for small businesses, when in actuality all that it does is require reasonable public accommodations,” Tainter said.

He was appointed to his $99,805-a-year post last April by Gov. Pete Wilson, who was mayor of San Diego when Tainter ran a private organization for the disabled there. The Rehabilitation Department has an annual budget of $270 million and about 2,000 employees.

Tainter said the department has three primary programs for the disabled--vocational rehabilitation for those with less severe disabilities, teaching independent living skills to those who can live on their own, and job training for the mentally disabled.

He said one program that the department is trying to implement is a mentor program that would match disabled adults with disabled children.

“This is important because if children with disabilities sees an adult with a disability in an important job, they’ll say, ‘I can do that, too,’ ” Tainter said.

Tainter, who contracted polio as a teen-ager, walks without aid, but requires a portable respirator to breathe and has limited use of his arms and hands. Also, his kidneys shut down three years ago, necessitating dialysis treatments three times a week.

His respirator is at the center of a $250,000 discrimination lawsuit Tainter filed last year against United Airlines after it would not allow him aboard a plane. The airline said the respirator’s battery contains a dangerous material, and Tainter, who was bound for Washington for a convention, later flew there on another airline.

The lawsuit is “still being negotiated,” Tainter said. “What we want is that there be standard guidelines that all airlines will follow. The federal government already says that transportation is to be equally accessible to people with disabilities.”