California disability law has costly effects: Documents disappear as state spends millions

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Dozens of wildfire reports disappeared from Cal Fire’s website as this year’s fire season began.

Thousands of water science reports vanished from the Department of Water Resources website.

More than 2 million documents, ranging from environmental impact reports to internal human resources guides, went missing from remote corners of Caltrans’ website.

The documents are disappearing from public view as California state departments work to comply with a 2017 law aimed at improving compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The law was meant to ensure all Californians could apply for jobs and find vital information on the state sites. The overhaul has proven costly and labor-intensive, with the result that some departments are choosing to permanently take down documents rather than pay to make them machine-readable or otherwise accessible.

Some researchers say removing the documents diminishes state government transparency.

“You certainly want to have documents being accessible to the disabled and the blind, but if doing that causes these documents to become unavailable for many years or even permanently to the public, I think there’s a tradeoff there that’s pretty large,” said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.

The great moments of California government.