HANOVER — Almost six years after an emergency operation on his spine left him walking with a cane, Kiel Alarcon still resists hanging one of those blue placards from the rear-view mirror of his car.
And good luck talking to the Windsor musician, who used to bike regularly to work in Hanover, into affixing license plates that would entitle him to park in convenient spots designated for drivers and passengers with disabilities.
“I can get around pretty well,” the 30-something guitarist and music producer said Thursday. “I want to save those spaces for people who need it more.”
The long-unmet needs of such people — from survivors of accidents and crippling disease to those whose bodies simply are wearing down with time and overuse — prompted Congress to pass, and then-President George H.W. Bush to sign, the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Over the ensuing decades, the legislation outlawing discrimination against the disabled and mandating access to public accommodations opened many doors, physical and legal.
And yet throughout the Upper Valley and nationwide, obstacles remain, literal and commercial and governmental — and not always intentional.
Michele Beers, who moved from Claremont to the Lebanon Towers complex for seniors after giving up driving, said this week that she struggles to navigate electric shopping carts through narrow aisles in grocery stores. She needs the carts partly because she’s getting around on “bone-on-bone knees” and also because she’s still recovering from smashing her face and dislocating her right shoulder while crossing Hanover Street in 2016.
“I tripped over the high curb,” Beers said during lunch at the Upper Valley Senior Center in Lebanon, where she volunteers. “I couldn’t stop. Just kept going, going, going down.”
With an eye to limiting the number of such accidents as the population ages, Hanover is assembling an “ADA Transition Plan for Public Rights-of-Way.” The current draft includes a provision to send inspectors out regularly to monitor the condition of curb ramps between town streets and sidewalks.
“Our sidewalks are looking pretty long in the tooth,” Hanover Town Manager Julia Griffin said on Thursday. “I think the last time we did a complete overhaul downtown was 25 years ago.”
Beyond downtown, Hanover also is preparing to widen and resurface for wheelchair users a section of its River Trail, now a narrow dirt path running from South Main Street to the confluence of Mink Brook and the Connecticut River.
Around the Upper Valley, other changes for the better for the disabled include the Access AT service that Advance Transit added to its offerings in 2007, to meet updated ADA requirements. Under the supervision of a “paratransit manager,” the nonprofit annually picks up and delivers thousands of Upper Valley residents “who are unable to use our fixed-route bus services, who can’t get to the bus stop or have some other challenge,” Advance Transit Executive Director Van Chesnut said on Thursday.
Still, compliance with the spirit as much as the letter of the law remains a work in progress. Alarcon recently called out, in person and on social media, a White River Junction restaurant that was roping off its wheelchair ramp so that patrons eating outdoors could play a lawn game there.
“I don’t try to be mean or self-righteous about it,” Alarcon said. “I just remember the time I had to spend in a wheelchair. Even though it was two months in (Boston’s) Spaulding (Rehabilitation Center) and just a month or two after I came home, it was hard. I see people in wheelchairs around Windsor now, where some of the sidewalks are torn up, and they’ll go out in the road, out in traffic.
“It makes me nervous.”
Almost any disabled person or advocate can count the ways in which obstacles make them nervous, and often angry:
■Shopping-center parking spaces marked “handicapped” with insufficient room, when cars impinge on either side, to pull a wheelchair or a walker out of one’s car or to shove one back in.
■Non-disabled people co-opting those parking spaces, as well as seats set aside at cultural events and some political rallies.
■Portable toilets with seats too high — even if sanitary — for all but the most acrobatic and upper-body-strong users of wheelchairs to swing or lift themselves onto.
“Everyone I know from the work we do here has had a challenge around public accommodations,” said Laura Perez, executive director of the Lebanon-based Special Needs Support Center, said. “One of the things people have to appreciate, whether they’re businesses or towns or institutions, is that ‘accommodation’ starts way before the physical accommodation. It starts with giving the message very publicly that you welcome all people, that you welcome a diverse population.”
Merchants in Woodstock Village thought they were conveying that welcome pretty well until 2012. That year, the Vermont Human Rights Commission alerted 13 of them that an anonymous man in a wheelchair had tested their accommodations and filed complaints against them for failing to provide appropriate access under the ADA — in areas ranging from ramps and wide-enough bathroom stalls to lack of Braille signs.
The complaints led to inspections by the commission and by the U.S. Department of Justice, and over the ensuing two-plus years, to the business community spending hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — to improve access.
On both the commercial and the municipal side of the equation, most towns and institutions are still adjusting.
“We’re looking at (accessibility) all the time,” Griffin said. “We’re constantly focusing on our own facilities and inspecting new construction and renovations of buildings for compliance with ADA. It’s an ongoing effort. It requires money. It is not inexpensive.
“You’ve got to prioritize it with everything else we’ve got going.”
So Rob Taylor keeps learning. During his years as a selectman in his native Plainfield, the town struggled with a wide range of accessibility issues in its public buildings. To this day, he noted recently, the library in Plainfield Village meets most ADA standards while the one in Meriden still needs work.
More recently, for his day job, he’s examining and weighing such big- and small-picture issues as Enfield’s administrator of land use and community development.
“As municipal officials, we want to do the very best for all of our citizens,” Taylor said. “A lot of the time, it’s a slow process. We’re dealing with a lot of old and outdated buildings. And even if you put in, say, a ramp from the outside, the aisles in, say, a library, might not be wide enough for people with wheelchairs and walkers. Or the bathrooms are still hard to negotiate.”
While Plainfield has a capital reserve fund for projects aimed at bringing town facilities into compliance with the ADA, Enfield is addressing the long-term questions of accessibility on a couple of fronts, Taylor said.
They include a facilities committee that’s weighing how best to adapt the buildings that house emergency-response agencies, municipal offices and the public library, and a panel examining the development of the town’s new Mascoma Lakeside Park, about half a mile south of downtown via the Northern Rail Trail.
Even with improvements at the park, including a ramp down to the lake, Canaan resident Ralph Epifanio believes that Enfield has a long way to go with making its recreational facilities user-friendly to wheelchair users. He said that the town beach, at the Route 4A end of Shaker Bridge, is difficult for people like himself with mobility issues. Would-be swimmers must descend a relatively steep slope of sand leading to the water, with the nearest parking lot on a bluff across the busy highway, reachable by steep stairs or a long detour to a winding entrance road.
And that’s just one of the obstacles Epifanio encounters daily while navigating his adopted home region, which, on his more frustrating days, the former resident of Long Island and Florida calls the “Valley of the Damned.” Highest on his list? Functionaries at public and private institutional offices, particularly state agencies, who “kick the can down the road” when someone calls their attention to obstacles, omissions and violations of the rights of the disabled.
“More often than not,” Epifanio said the other day, “they offer excuses.”
So imagine his surprise when Enfield Town Manager Ryan Aylesworth offered help, after personally inspecting and measuring a portable toilet at Huse Park, whose seat Epifanio had found was too high for most wheelchair users to swing or lift themselves into.
“At present … one of the Town’s four port-a-potties is ADA compliant and three are not,” Aylesworth told Epifanio in a recent email. “We are in the process of obtaining price quotes from the vendor for additional port-apotties that are classified as being ADA compliant with the hope of having these in place by next spring.”
“The guy actually did something,” Epifanio said. “That’s rare. Extremely rare.”
Another exception in Epifanio’s eyes is Patrick O’Neill, Dartmouth College’s director of transportation services. While his primary constituency is students and college staff, O’Neill one day drove Epifanio around campus, asking for suggestions to improve parking accessibility. At a subsequent football game, Epifanio found a couple of portable signs, in the small lot next to Memorial Field, designating additional game-day access for disabled drivers.
“If someone comes to me with a concern, it’s a thoughtful process we go through,” said O’Neill, who used to run the Hanover Police Department’s parking enforcement office in Town Hall. “If there’s a possible solution, we’ll make the added effort to accommodate that.
“It’s a constant conversation.”
It’s the kind of conversation that a variety of area institutions are seeking with the Special Needs Support Center. As one example, Perez, the executive director, pointed to recent invitations from the Vermont Institute of Natural Science to train VINS’ staff in “disability etiquette,” and to assess VINS’ Forest Canopy Walk exhibit.
“They were so open to our thoughts and ideas,” Perez said. “We’re looking forward to building those kinds of relationships.”
Alarcon hopes that such relationships, and less formal ones, open doors for people with disabilities, and along the way open the eyes of individuals and institutions alike to their needs – and their humanity.
“It’s kind of an invisible community,” Alarcon said. “If it’s too hard for people to get out and around with the rest of us, it just perpetuates itself.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.