Good legislation is rare out of Sacramento, but we have managed to find a particularly sensible bill.
Senate Bill 84 will encourage businesses which may be out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act to correct those violations without being penalized.
The bipartisan legislation, introduced by Sen. Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, and coauthored by Democratic Sens. Angelique Ashby of Sacramento, Anna Caballero of Merced, Sasha Renée Pérez of the San Gabriel Valley and Aisha Wahab of Silicon Valley, is a balanced approach to a complex issue.
As summarized by the legislative counsel, “This bill would prohibit a construction-related accessibility claim for statutory damages from being initiated in a legal proceeding against a defendant who employs 50 or fewer individuals, as specified, unless the defendant has been served with a letter specifying each alleged violation, and the alleged violations have not been corrected within 120 days of service of the letter.”
In practice, this means businesses will have a few months to correct identified issues before being hit with costly civil penalties by litigants who may or may not have even been negatively impacted by the identified issues.
Indeed, the ADA has long been an easily abused law in the state of California, which has incentivized serial plaintiffs to go up and down the state finding anything they can find to sue over.
As noted in the bill analysis, “Two plaintiffs filed more than 1,000 combined ADA lawsuits across California from 2020-2021 and are some of the most frequent filers in Northern California, according to an NBC Bay area analysis. In 2021, California had more disability access lawsuits filed than the remaining 49 states, combined.”
Some of these suits are over obviously trivial issues, “Amongst the suits filed are those for a bathroom mirror being one and a half inches too high, the handicap sign on a restroom being the wrong shape, and the color of the handicap parking space sign not being the specified shade of blue.”
There’s no legitimate reason businesses need to be shelling out money for lawyers and civil penalties over such things.
The bill easily cleared the state Senate, with only two opposed (Sens. Dave Cortese of Santa Clara and Maria Elena Durazo of Los Angeles). We hope it is swiftly approved by the Assembly and signed into law by the governor.