N.D.Cal.: Ruling on ADA immunity, regulations, class cert.

A California federal district court issued a ruling addressing sovereign immunity, the enforceability of federal regulations, and class certification in a suit alleging systemic failure to accommodate persons with disabilities in maintaining sidewalks, crosswalks and other pedestrian pathways. Californians for Disability Rights, Inc. v. Cal. Dep’t of Transp., 2008 WL 697065 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 13, 2008) (No. 06-5125).

  The court followed Ninth Circuit precedent holding generally that Title II of the ADA validly abrogates state sovereign immunity. However, the court found that the ADA’s private right of action does not extend to its “self-evaluation” and “transition plan” regulations. Finally, the court granted class certification. 

 

                The Department of Transportation (“Caltrans”) argued that Title II of the ADA did not validly abrogate state sovereign immunity in this case because its “proposed remedial scheme is not congruent and proportional to any identified harm inflicted by the states in the context of sidewalks or Park and Ride lots.” The district court rejected this argument, pointing to a “long string of Ninth Circuit precedent expressly establishing Congressional sovereign abrogation in the context of ADA claims under Title II.” The court takes Caltrans to task at length for asking it to disregard these decisions. Curiously, the court’s opinion does not mention or address United States v. Georgia, 546 U.S. 151 (2006), which was decided subsequent to the circuit decisions it cited and which stated that statutory abrogation analysis should focus on the specific subject of the suit – which is what Caltrans’s argument here appeared to do.

 

                The district court also rejected, in light of circuit precedent, Caltrans’s argument that the Ex Parte Young exception to sovereign immunity did not apply to this case because California was the “real party in interest.”

 

                On a less positive note, the court held that the ADA regulations at issue were not enforceable under Title II’s express private right of action, based on Alexander v. Sandoval, 532 U.S. 275 (2001) (holding that regulations that go beyond the substance of the statute they purportedly implement are not privately enforceable). The court followed the First and Sixth Circuits, and an unpublished decision from a sister court in its District, in holding that the ADA’s “self-evaluation” and “transition plan” regulations, 28 C.F.R. §§ 35.105 and 35.150(d), exceed the scope of the statute itself and therefore are not privately enforceable. See Ability Center of Greater Toledo v. City of Sandusky, 385 F.3d 901 (6th Cir. 2004); Iverson v. City of Boston, 452 F.3d 94 (1st Cir.2006); Cherry v. City College of San Francisco, 2005 WL 2620560 (N.D.Cal.2005). It disagreed with a Tenth Circuit decision holding that Title II regulations generally are enforceable. Chaffin v. Kansas State Fair Bd., 348 F.3d 850 (10th Cir. 2003). The court held that:

Sandoval directs a regulation-by-regulation analysis, as opposed to the “collective” approach endorsed by the Tenth Circuit, in order to determine if each one exhibits a Congressional intent to create a private right of enforcement. In the present case it is conceivable that, as previously noted by this Court's sister court in Cherry, both the transition plan and self-evaluation regulations might both be violated and yet there could still be no violation of Title II, and therefore Congress's intent to create a private right of enforcement for violations of Title to II itself cannot be imputed to the accompanying regulations.

Accordingly, the court dismissed the claims under these regulations, but permitted other claims under the ADA to proceed.

 

                In opposing class certification, Caltrans argued that the access issues complained of were not the result of any centralized plan, and thus a class action would require individualized assessment of a litany of allegedly inadequate pathways. This argument, the court said:

 misconstrue[d] the nature of plaintiffs’ claims and requested relief,” since the existence of a centralized policy of discrimination “is precisely what is at issue in plaintiffs’ claims…. Taken to its logical conclusion, under defendants' reasoning, no civil rights class action would ever be maintainable, because, in order to prove the existence of a discriminatory pattern or practice, each class member would have to individually prove the highly individualized factors relating to each instance of discrimination they allegedly suffered. This would simply obviate the concept of the class action lawsuit.

The court also rejected Caltrans’s argument that the plaintiff class was not sufficiently numerous because the plaintiffs identified only 22 specified affected class members, and provided only general statistics about the numbers of people with relevant disabilities in the state. The court countered, however, that “courts regularly rely” on this type of statistical data, and that  “there is no real question that there are at least 22 class members, and, extrapolating from the statistical data presented by plaintiffs, common sense dictates that there are thousands-if not hundreds of thousands-more.” Finally, the court rejected the argument that class certification was improper because it was not necessary to achieve relief for the class members, stating that “there is no requirement that class certification must be ‘necessary’” and that “such a requirement would effectively eviscerate” Federal Rule 23(b)(2), which allows class actions based on similar treatment of class members.