28 Years After Americans With Disabilities Act Passes, Newport Seems to Ignore the Law - Hinckley
Sunday, January 20, 2019
28 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, tourist town Newport, Rhode Island still doesn’t have sidewalks on many major and minor streets, let alone compliant ones.
The primary industry in Newport is tourism and like any other 300-year-old city by the sea, it wasn’t designed for automobiles. Small roads and limited parking are realities in Newport. By necessity, Newport is a walking town and logic would dictate that the town would invest in infrastructure to support the city’s 3.5 million annual walking and wheeling visitors, not only for convenience, but also for public safety.
Furthermore, Newport is Kennedy Country, JFK was married here, Ted partied here and Patrick served congress from here. ADA was one of Ted Kennedy’s crowning legislative achievements. So why would Newport be so far out of ADA compliance and blatantly ignore its own public safety commitments?
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe root cause seems to be budgetary priorities. Newport has only spent $13.71 million on roads over the past nine years and $5.9 million on sidewalks. This averages out to roughly 2% of the annual budget, where the national average cities and towns spend on roads and sidewalks is 4% of the annual budget, not including State and Federal investments. In other words, Newport spends about half of the national average on road and sidewalk repair, in a pedestrian town. ADA requires cities and towns to step up their investment on road and sidewalk improvements, but it appears Newport not only ignored the reality of ADA and public safety, it sailed hard in the other direction.
Tourism in Newport in largely confined between Bellevue Avenue, the mansions and Cliff Walk to the East and Downtown / America’s Cup Avenue and Thames Street to the West.
Sadly, in this district, main streets don’t have sidewalks and others that exist aren’t ADA compliant.
Case in point:
The intersection of Bellevue and Narragansett Avenues is a Major intersection in the heart of Newport’s mansion / Cliff Walk tourist area, but oddly Narragansett Avenue has no sidewalks on either side of the street, leading east to the Cliff Walk where upwards of 750,000 people visit per year on foot and wheelchair OR West to Thames and Spring Streets which is the historic shopping and dining district. Above is a photo of a 60-year-old tree growing up where a sidewalk would be in a normal city. This sadly is the “main drag” to the Cliff Walk from the famed Bellevue Avenue. Good luck with your wheelchair! Mind the cars while you’re jogging in the street.
Below is a photo of a teacher leading students on a tour of the neighborhood walking along a centuries-old dirt path and spilling into the street. Experts will tell you, lack of sidewalks isn’t only an ADA issue, it’s a public safety issue.
As it relates to the streets, the local residents and students have to suffer, fahgetaboutit… it’s laughable, you’ll literally be walking down a residential street, the sidewalk will end and you’ll be in someone’s front yard, only to have it start again a couple blocks down, if at all. In fact, one of the major streets students use leading to Salve Regina University, Annandale Avenue, also has no sidewalks, in its place are well-worn dirt paths, etched into the side of the busy road. The same is true for sections of Gibbs Avenue leading to and by St. Michael’s primary school.
Homeowners in Newport will tell you the city runs zoning with an iron fist. In fact, the tough part about being a homeowner in Newport is, everything you want to do takes a variance. The housing stock in Newport is old, very old. Many houses were built on small lots by struggling Irish and Italian immigrants who worked in and on the mansions for America’s wealthy, like Anderson Cooper’s family, the Vanderbilt’s. Since then, Newport has adopted zoning that allows roughly 30% lot coverage by buildings, yet existing homes in Newport are on average 50-70% lot coverage. This means if you want to do anything to improve your home it requires a variance, lawyers, money, an act of god and a ton of ass kissing.
So this begs the question, why does a town that holds its home and business owners to high levels of compliance, not hold itself to the same standard, 28 years after Ted Kennedy’s American’s with Disability Act AND ignore the case for public safety regarding the 3.5 million tourists and 27,000 locals?
I reached out to the city for comment and was pointed to a commitment the city made to ADA compliance in 2010. However, little action has been taken and major issues on major streets like Narragansett Avenue, where hundreds of thousands of people walk or wheel each year, haven’t been tackled, 9 years later, and there is no plan in place to do so... That said, the city forwarded me a comment and I quote, “We’ve actually explored the concept of installing sidewalks on Narragansett Avenue and are hopeful that we’ll be able to do so.” I wonder if as a home or business owner I could spend a few decades “exploring the concept” of complying with generally accepted safety standards, like smoke detectors, sprinklers, railings, exits, not to mention zoning laws and get away with it in Newport???…You can’t make this stuff up folks, our own government which busts chops on home and business owners for a living, is still discussing the concept of a sidewalk, 28 years after ADA, on one of the busiest pedestrian streets in the state…
I’m expecting the city will be quite upset at me for shining a light on such an important issue of safety, compliance and neglect. I hope they don’t shoot the messenger (if they do I’ll report back), rather they look inward and endeavor to solve such an obvious and important problem, starting by commissioning a comprehensive, third party, non-government, ADA and pedestrian safety audit. Clearly, the standard the city has held itself to for the past 28 years smacks of “kicking the can down the sidewalk”. I’m a firm believer that it’s not only citizens that should be held accountable; our government should be held accountable. Do as I say, not as I do, is not ok. Rhode Island has the seventh highest tax burden in the country, we deserve more as taxpayers than simply, “exploring the concept” of things like sidewalks…
I can’t believe we are having this conversation in 2019...only in Rhode Island.
Barry Hinckley is a businessman, former candidate for United States Senate and a Newport resident.
Related Articles
- Barry Hinckley: Where Will You Be When Rhode Island Goes Broke?
- Hinckley: Why Progressives Hate Entrepreneurs + Business Owners
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Hinckley: A Test for Whitehouse - Environment or Political Expediency
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Hinckley: America’s Major Segregation Problem