THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 9, 1996 TAG: 9603090001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: By KERRY DOUGHERTY
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
Here is a story without heroes about people short on common sense and overly fond of rules. The ending isn't clear, but a dispute over $1,200 will certainly cost Virginia taxpayers thousands.
It began in 1992 when Mark Phillips, a Mary Washington College junior, asked to live alone in a room on the first floor of the Willard Hall dormitory. Mr. Phillips suffers from a degenerative disease. After years on crutches, he found himself in a wheelchair, faced with the difficult task of negotiating his way around the hilly Fredericksburg campus. Room 104 seemed to offer him the best living accommodations.
The school obliged, and then billed Phillips an extra $300 for living alone in a double dormitory room. He objected to the fee. The school insisted. He contacted a Richmond organization called Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME) which handles discrimination cases. He was told Mary Washington College was violating his rights under the Fair Housing Act, which requires landlords to make ``reasonable accommodation'' to people with disabilities.
Phillips and HOME contacted the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which launched an investigation into the college. Meanwhile, Mary Washington College officials agreed to stop billing Mr. Phillips during the investigation.
In 1994 Phillips graduated. School officials say they never received a final HUD report. Instead of leaving well enough alone, Mary Washington billed him for $1,200 - four semesters' worth of single-housing charges.
Mr. Phillips contacted HOME, and the organization filed an action through the U.S. Justice Department.
The feds have made offers to the state to settle the case. The Virginia attorney general's office - which is representing the college - claims that one such offer included $85,000 in compensatory damages to Mr. Phillips and HOME, and sensitivity training for Mary Washington administrators and students, to include traveling about campus in wheelchairs for a week.
``These demands are outrageous,'' says deputy state Attorney General William Hurd.
He's right; they are.
Meanwhile, Mary Washington College has canceled Mr. Phillips' $1,200 debt.
But Mr. Phillips has not agreed to cancel his lawsuit. The matter seems certain to go to trial.
Virginia taxpayers ought to be asking: How in the world did this happen?
Under the lawsuit filed last week, Mr. Phillips and HOME are seeking an unspecified monetary award against the college for damage caused when he was billed for his single room.
Mr. Phillips is right; it's a nuisance to receive bills, especially erroneous ones. But $85,000? It seems the Mary Washington College billing department is not the only one short on common sense.
Deputy Attorney General Hurd has vowed the state will pay ``not one cent'' in damages to Phillips. But the cost of defending against the lawsuit will inevitably be passed on to taxpayers.
Let's go back a bit. To the point where the school in 1992 contended that Mr. Phillips had no medical need to have a single room just because he was using a wheelchair.
Have these dunderheads never visited a college dorm room? Unless the rooms have grown considerably in the 20 years since I lived in one, these cells were never meant to be shared by two people and a wheelchair.
Oops, we're talking sense here, and there's no room for sense in a rule book.
Mr. Hurd says the reason Phillips was billed after he graduated was to tidy things up.
``Heck,'' Hurd said this week, ``HUD never got back to the college; they guessed HUD was abandoning the case. So the college sent him a bill because they wanted to go ahead and close out the case.''
Well, far from closing out the case, the college blundered into reopening it. In a big way.
We don't know how this story will end. But get out the checkbook. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB