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CALL FOR NOMINATIONS OPENS FOR 2006 BARRIER-FREE AMERICA AWARD
National Award Recognizes Contributions to Accessible Design
Washington, DC – The Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA), a national veterans’ service and disability rights organization, has issued a call for nominations for the 2006 Barrier-Free America Award.
Each year, PVA honors an individual with this national award for his sensitivity to the importance of accessible design, as well as the difference he has made through a particular project in achieving a barrier-free environment.
It is estimated that the demand for accessible design solutions will skyrocket in the next 25 years as the number of Americans over the age of 50 increases to a total of 115 million individuals. Add to this the number—Americans with non-age related mobility impairments—and our country faces a significant number of individuals whose lives would be greatly enhanced through accessible design at home, work or in public places.
This year, for his role and influence in bringing accessibility issues to the forefront in the creation of Chicago’s Millennium Park, PVA honored Edward Uhlir, FAIA as the recipient of the 2005 Barrier-Free America Award. Previous winners of the Barrier-Free America Award have included Frederic Bell, FAIA, for the redevelopment plans of lower Manhattan; Cesar Pelli, FAIA, for his design of the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport; and Bob Vila, for his promotion of accessible design through his television show and web site, www.bobvila.com.
Submissions can be for, but are not limited to, individuals who work in the following areas: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Construction Industry, Engineering, Facilities Management, Building Development and Public Education. All award nomination entries must include a nomination form and essay and must be postmarked no later than Friday, January 13, 2006. Nomination forms can be found and downloaded at www.accessibledesign.org. The award will be presented in June 2006.
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Columnist George Will, Gerald Reynolds and the ADA
On March 11, the Washington Post published George Will's column on President Bush's pick to lead the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Gerald Reynolds. In addition to factual errors, Will neglects to mention the opposition -- fueled by Reynolds's attacks on the ADA -- of hundreds of disability organizations.
Below is ADA Watch's Letter to The Editor.
Will's column is published in many U.S. newspapers and we encourage you to contact your local editors to correct the record.
The original column is included at the bottom of this email.
March 15, 2005
Washington Post
VIA FACSIMILE: 202-334-4536
To the Washington Post Editor:
George Will’s call to dismantle the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (March 11, 2005) may help to explain President Bush’s cynical decision to appoint Gerald Reynolds as the Commission's chairman. Why else appoint a longtime critic of civil right laws to the very body charged with safeguarding such protections?
But, in making his case, Mr. Will is wrong on at least one assertion.
In praising Mr. Reynolds’s resume, he states that Reynolds "became head of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) under the first President Bush." In fact, Reynolds never worked for George H.W. Bush.
Reynolds served very briefly at the OCR following his recess appointment in 2002 by the current President Bush – a move that bypassed nearly certain rejection by the U.S. Senate. Without this maneuvering, Reynolds’s resume would consist of his practice as a corporate lawyer and his association with right-wing think tanks that have relentlessly attacked affirmative action, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other civil rights laws.
Because roughly 60 percent of all discrimination complaints that OCR investigates involve students with disabilities, hundreds of disability organizations joined the larger civil rights community in opposing Reynolds’s appointment. Our coalition was deeply alarmed by Reynolds’s claims during testimony -- before the same Commission that he will now chair – that the ADA would "retard economic progress in urban centers across the country." He also served as legal counsel on the staff of the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO), a group that repeatedly has attacked the ADA and pushed efforts to weaken this crucial law.
The first President Bush – who signed the ADA into law in 1990– surely would not have considered Reynolds qualified to lead the nation’s efforts to alleviate discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin .
While we can excuse George Will for getting his facts wrong, it is harder to dismiss President George W. Bush’s appointment of someone so hostile to the very laws he is now charged with promoting.
Sincerely,
Jim Ward, Founder and President
ADA Watch and the National Coalition for Disability Rights
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From the Washington Post:
George Will: The U.S. Civil Rights Commission
March 11, 2005
WASHINGTON -- In contemporary American politics, as in earlier forms of vaudeville, it helps to have had an easy act to follow. Gerald Reynolds certainly did.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights' new chairman follows Mary Frances Berry, whose seedy career -- 24 years on the commission, 11 of them as chairman -- mixed tawdry pec ulation, boorish behavior and absurd rhetoric. Because Reynolds represents such a bracing change, it is tempting to just enjoy the new 6-to-2 conservative ascendancy on the commission and forgo asking a pertinent question: Why not retire the commission?
Its $9 million budget -- about 60 employees and six field offices -- is, as Washington reckons these things, negligible. So even Berry's flamboyant mismanagement of it -- several Government Accountability Office reports have said federal guidelines were ignored during her tenure; another report is coming -- was small beer, even when including the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paid to the public relations firm that mediated her relations with the media. But although the monetary savings from closing the commission would be small, two prudential reasons for doing so are large.
One is that someday Democrats will again control the executive branch and may again stock the commission with extremists -- Berry celebrated Communist China's educational system in 1977, when she was assistant secretary of education; she made unsubstantiated charges of vast ``disenfranchisement" of Florida voters in 2000 -- from the wilder shores of racial politics. The second reason for terminating the commission is that civil rights rhetoric has become a crashing bore and, worse, a cause of confusion: Almost everything designated a ``civil rights'' problem isn't.
The commission has no enforcement powers, only the power to be, Reynolds says, a ``bully pulpit.'' And if someone must be preaching from it, by all means let it be Reynolds. Born in the South Bronx, the son of a New York City policeman, he is no stranger to the moral muggings routinely administered to African-American conservatives. But he says, ``If you think I'm conservative, you should come with me to a black barbershop. I'm usually the most liberal person there,'' w here cultural conservatism -- on crime, welfare, abortion, schools -- flourishes.
After working in some conservative think tanks, he became head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights in the administration of the first President Bush. He is currently a corporate lawyer in Kansas City, where he has witnessed the handiwork of an imperial judge who, running the school system, ordered the spending of nearly $2 billion in a spectacular, if redundant, proof that increased financial inputs often do not correlate with increased cognitive outputs.
But about this commission as bully pulpit: Does anyone really think America suffers from an insufficiency of talk about race? What is in scarce supply is talk about the meaning of the phrase ``civil rights.'' Not every need is a right, and if the adjective is a modifier that modifies, not every right is a civil right -- one central to participation in civic life.
Reynolds, 41, says that the core function of civil rights laws is to prevent discrimination, meaning ``the distribution of benefits and burdens on the basis of race.'' But if so, today a -- perhaps the -- principal discriminator is government, with racial preferences and the rest of the reparations system that flows from the assumption that disparities in social outcomes must be caused by discrimination, and should be remedied by government transfers of wealth.
Reynolds rightly says that the core function of the civil rights laws, which required ``a lot of heavy lifting by the federal government,'' was to dismantle a caste system maintained by law. But that has been accomplished.
It is, as Reynolds says, scandalous that so few black 17-year-old males read at grade level; that so many black teenagers are not mentored to think about college as a possibility and of SAT tests as important; that many youn g blacks -- 68.2 percent are now born out of wedlock -- are enveloped in the culture that appalls Bill Cosby, a culture that disparages academic seriousness as ``acting white'' and celebrates destructive behaviors. Reynolds is right that much of this can be traced far back to discriminatory events or contexts.
But this is a problem of class, one that is both cause and effect of a cultural crisis. It is rooted in needs, such as functional families and good schools, that are not rights in the sense of enforceable claims. Civil rights laws and enforcement agencies are barely relevant. Proper pulpits -- perhaps including barbershops -- are relevant. Government pulpits are not.
©2005 Washington Post Writers Group
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Important Note
The above information is provided as a service and is not necessarily the opinion of Disability Relations Group or its management.
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