Implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act in small and medium-sized municipalities.

Abstract

The theoretical perspective taken in this research combines the incremental and the boundedly rational approach to decision-making. It suggests that the level of compliance is based on the fact that municipal decision-makers do not take a rational approach to implementation but, instead, take an integrated boundedly rational/incremental approach to implementation. This approach argues that organizations, when faced with a complex, confusing, or potentially conflictual decision, will seek to simplify the decision-making process. Further, when simplifying the decision-making process, organizations will rely upon a few key variables to influence and guide their decision-making. Additionally, the study argues that the variables that influence an organization's decisions may be found in the internal and external environment of these organizations.

This research analyzes the forces and conditions that influence the implementation of unfunded national policy mandates taking as its main focus the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) among small and medium-sized municipalities nationwide. The Act requires that public and private employers having more than twenty-five employees revamp their facilities and employment rules to provide for increased facility access and employment opportunities for the disabled. The research takes the approach that the ADA implementation efforts of small and medium-sized cities are conditioned upon the internal and external environment of city government. Thus, the influences on ADA implementation efforts are theorized to be economic, social, and political.

Utilizing existing literature, a model of influences upon implementation is developed and tested, and its parameters estimated using regression analysis. The research results show that municipal officials remain confused and lack knowledge of the requirements of the ADA. Results from the questionnaire suggest that municipalities are implementing the ADA, albeit incrementally. The qualitative findings also show that many municipal officials are behaving in a boundedly rational fashion concerning ADA implementation. The research demonstrates that national public policy implementation is not necessarily a linear, top-down process, nor do municipal officials behave in a rational, comprehensive fashion. Further, the research findings provide support for the view that it is indeed the local environment that most affects municipal compliance with policy mandates. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Implementation of the ADA has been a slow and tedious process due to the complexity of the Act and court cases arising from the Act. This study focuses on cities between 10,000 and 100,000 in population and attempts to show that non-compliance is more pervasive than is commonly believed. The data set for the research consists of a random sample mail survey of seventy-five small and medium-sized municipalities from each of the four regions of the United States. The number of individual observations for this research is 135 respondents. These observations form the dependent variable for the research.