The ADA Says People with Disabilities Have Rights.
Getting Them in Georgia Is Another Story.

The ADA promises people with disabilities the same opportunities as everyone else.

So What About Georgia? What About Georgia, Georgia, Yeah?

The answer is far from peachy.

This site documents what happened when I asked the State Bar of Georgia, the City of Brookhaven, and GIRMA / Gallagher Bassett for help, only after their own systems broke.

Here are just two of many examples of what I experienced.

“Your invocation of the ADA process may be directed less toward obtaining accommodation for a functional limitation and more toward securing a particular substantive outcome … or toward establishing a basis for further legal action against the State Bar.”William D. NeSmith III, Deputy General Counsel, State Bar of Georgia. May 12, 2026.Don’t believe me. Read the email.

“You have presented dozens of emails to Ms. Boscoe and others in volume and frequency that is not productive and has crossed into the realm of harassment. Your efforts seem to be less intended to vindicate any bona fide legal right than to exploit laws unrelated to the merits of the claim for the purpose of annoyance.”James R. Westbury, Jr., outside counsel for GIRMA and Gallagher Bassett. May 1, 2026.

I first tried to call the City of Brookhaven and email a simple complaint, the kind a five minute call would have handled. Instead I got asked, more than five times, who my attorney was. It was baffling, and indicative of their posture from the start. A disabled dad with a simple complaint on one side. The City’s contract attorney on the other. When they refused to speak to me, I filed a complaint with the State Bar of Georgia and filed a GORA, a request under the Georgia Open Records Act, because those were the only options the City left me.

One, the open records. I filed under the Georgia Open Records Act, and the City priced a single request at $49,385 and ran its demands up to $58,603.85. In one afternoon it closed a majority of my requests in under twenty minutes, even ones I had already paid for. Its own police department answers the public in about 1.3 days. Mine averaged 60. I paid hundreds of dollars and got almost nothing. My requests for an explanation went ghosted.

Two, the lost complaint. The State Bar of Georgia reviewed my complaint and moved it forward. That is not a given. Most grievances are screened out and never advance. Mine did, and the Bar asked me to respond to the lawyer’s answer. I responded twice. The Bar lost both of my submissions and dismissed my complaint on April 10, on the ground that no rebuttal had come in. Eleven days later its own Assistant General Counsel, Leigh Burgess, admitted the opposite: “As a result of this misclassification, your submissions were not added to the grievance file at that time.” They had my responses the whole time. They misfiled them, left them out of the file, and dismissed my complaint for a rebuttal they said never arrived. Even after admitting that mistake in writing, they left the dismissal in place.

Three, the claims and the silence. I went to the City’s insurer, GIRMA, and its administrator, Gallagher Bassett, to try to change the City’s behavior. The City had no ADA Title II coordinator, which federal law requires, and it had refused to act on my complaint or my open records requests. Again, I had no other option. Their own system split one matter into seven separate claims. Their Senior Resolution Manager, Belinda Boscoe, admitted they were “mistakenly set up as new claims.” I waited for calls that never came. I sent request after request for disability help and got ghosted, until Boscoe’s April 1 denial folded my ADA accommodation complaints in with “various administrative tasks” and closed the file, on a date they knew I would be having surgery and unable to respond.

I did not invoke my need for ADA assistance until it was simply impossible to keep up otherwise. I started with ordinary requests, the kind anyone can make. I invoked my rights only after each institution broke its own rules. I had never invoked the ADA process before.

This crazy behavior is what finally sent me looking for ADA help. And even then, what I asked for was minimal. A single point of contact. Written correspondence I could actually use. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing hard, nothing that gave me an advantage. Meanwhile they left me monitoring about 15 email addresses at each of them, roughly 45 across the City, the Bar, and GIRMA, and many were no reply. The crazy invoices and the automated claim notices came from inboxes that could not even take an answer. For what purpose?

That is when I invoked the ADA. Not first. Last. Only after their own systems broke.

The ADA became federal law in 1990.

Spaghetti Junction had just opened. The Braves and Falcons played at the old Fulton County Stadium. Atlanta had not yet been awarded the Olympics. Mobile phones still looked like bricks. Google did not exist. AOL had not yet mailed America a thousand useless CDs. Germany was still two countries.

That is how long Georgia public institutions have had to learn one basic thing. Disability is a federal right. The ADA says people with disabilities have the right to equal access, not whatever access an institution feels like giving.

I asked three Georgia institutions to honor a law that outlived their stadiums. Not one of them fixed the problem. Each one turned on the person asking.

I offered proof of my disability from the very start, before anyone asked. They questioned it anyway. The State Bar’s Deputy General Counsel, William D. NeSmith III, wrote on May 12 that “it does not appear that you require assistance,” pointing to my “detailed, articulate” writing, as if writing a clear sentence meant I was not disabled. And as if those clear sentences had not been dictated, every one of them, through the adaptive technology I use because I am.

When I reminded them the proof had been on the table the whole time, they changed the attack. They stopped questioning whether I was disabled and went after why I wanted help at all. Two lawyers put it in writing.

Neither of these lawyers had ever met me. Neither had any reason to answer a request for disability access with this kind of disproportion, or anything remotely like it. And when I asked the City of Brookhaven for a five minute call, its City Manager, Christian Sigman, declined “any meetings” and cited “potential litigation.”

I asked for Equal Access. They answered with accusations, harassment and delay.

That is not equal access. That is not compassion. And it is not how you would want your Disabled friend or family treated.

So I stopped asking and started keeping. Every email. Every dodge. Every date.

Every word that matters on this site is theirs. You do not have to believe me. You can read it all here. Their words, verbatim. And of course, the questions they would not answer.

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