Gettysburg Borough and several downtown Gettysburg Pennsylvania businesses are the target of Americans With Disabilities Act complaints due to noncompliance with the 1990 federal law that makes handicap accessibility a civil right. This is a real double-edged sword because many of these businesses have been around a lot longer than 1990. Gettysburg itself predates 1990 by more than 200 years. Handicap accessibility was not an issue for most of its history.

The other side of the coin is that Gettysburg is one of the hottest tourist attractions in the world. That makes it a prime target for lawsuits regarding handicap accessibility because if handicapped persons can’t enjoy the same amenities as the rest of the public then we can’t really say they have equal access to public facilities, which poses a civil rights issue, hence the reason for the lawsuits.

On one hand are the expenses of private businesses who are being asked to comply with a fairly new federal law and give handicapped individuals the same access to their shops that the rest of us have and on the other hand are the rights of the handicapped who just want to live as free as the rest of us. Do handicapped people have a right to enjoy history too?

Gettysburg Borough itself has done a poor job of informing businesses of the situation and now the hen has come home to roost. The question is, Where do we go from here?

Read more of the story here.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Business, Gettysburg, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.