Following a substantial outcry (see Mar. 14), the Department of Justice has announced a 60-day stay of its new regulations requiring costly lifts and other fixes at hotel pools. It will also consider a six-month extension to address what it insufferably describes as “misunderstandings regarding compliance with these ADA requirements.” Translation: “opponents were persuading the public that the mandate was unreasonable.” Hotel and insurance officials had confirmed that many operators were considering closing pools or smaller water features such as whirlpools, which must often be given their own separate permanent lift installations under the rules. [Barbara De Lollis, USA Today] On the notion that it doesn’t pay lawyers to sue over uncompliant hotel pools, see this 2007 coverage of what was even then a busy litigation docket in California and elsewhere.
4 Comments
Honestly, can you pay people to be this tone deaf? The 60 day delay brings it into effect right about Mother’s Day, and 2 weeks before Memorial Day ,the first holiday of summer.
— “Hey, kids! We’re going to visit Grandma, and at the hotel you can sit and look at the pool.”
Thanks, Barry. Since you have your own pool and your mother-in-law lives with you, this reg won’t affect you at all.
If the hotel drains the pool, and places a locked fence the empty pool then a skate boarder jumps the lock fence and while skating in the empty pool injuries himself; who will pay?
@wjflag–
I am grateful for the 60-delay until the summer season, as the election year heats up. It increases the chance that DoJ will be forced by higher authority to offer the consumer public a better deal than might be expected in the off-season.
[…] “Public pool owners struggle to meet chair-lift deadline” [Springfield, Ill. Journal-Register, earlier] […]