Start Here
Start here. A few questions, answered. Then see what happened.
Who I Am
I am a disabled dad who likes dogs, donuts, and dad jokes.
That is the short version. Here is the part that matters. I am the kind of person who keeps the receipt, saves the email, and reads the fine print before anyone asks me to. I did not go looking for a fight with anyone in Georgia. I went looking for records the law says I am allowed to have. What came back is the reason this site exists.
I learned early that words are evidence. I was the sports editor of my high school paper, back when papers still mattered, Google’s founders were still in diapers, and a mobile phone looked like a VCR you wore on your belt. In college I kept writing sports for the university paper. I got the intramural beat, which I won the way most people win the intramural beat. Nobody else wanted it. Editors edited. Deadlines mattered. The games mattered enormously to the people playing them and not at all to anyone else. I wrote them up anyway, on time, every time, like the intramural scoreboard was headed for The Sporting News.
For more than 25 years, I worked in some of the most competitive, ruthless, and contentious real estate markets in the world, participating in more than 15,000 deals.
My job was never to start fights. It was to end them. I solved problems, found the middle ground, kept people talking, got the terms in writing, and closed before a disagreement could turn into a war. In all of it, I never sued anyone. Not once. Ending disputes quietly is what I am good at. I do not raise my voice for sport. When I do, it is because every quieter way already failed.
This is what it took. I am a qualified individual with a disability. I asked for access, and I asked for records, in writing, the way the law allows. The asking became the problem. Requests that any other person could make were treated as harassment.
Think about that. The man whose entire career was ending disputes quietly, who closed 15,000 deals without suing a single person, asked Georgia institutions for records and access. And their answer, in writing, was that the asking was the harassment.
Three of them are on that record. The State Bar of Georgia, the agency that polices every lawyer in the state. The City of Brookhaven and its Police Department. GIRMA and its claims administrator, Gallagher Bassett, the people paid to handle exactly this. ADA Matters is where their answers live. Their own words, their own dates, under their own names. Nobody on this site is quoted by anyone but themselves.
I told you I am the kind of person who keeps the receipt. This site is the receipt.
I am not asking you to take my word for any of it. I am asking you to read theirs. And when you do, put a face on it. Your disabled friend. Your father. Your wife. Your kid. Your neighbor two doors down. Then ask yourself if this is how you would want their questions answered.
What Is ADA Matters
ADA Matters is a public record built from documents. It is what happened when I asked three named Georgia institutions, the State Bar of Georgia, the City of Brookhaven and its Police Department, and GIRMA with its claims administrator Gallagher Bassett, for three ordinary things: access, communication, and a fair process.
The name works twice. ADA Matters, as in the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal law that has required access for people with disabilities since 1990. And ADA matters, as in it is not optional, which is apparently news in Georgia.
What I asked for was routine. What came back was delay, silence, shifting positions, or escalation. Every instance of it is documented here, with the email, the date, and the name attached.
Three things this site is not. It is not a revenge project. It is not a rant. And it is not legal advice. It is a record, kept the way records are kept, because at some point the record became too clear to ignore.
The people quoted on this site wrote every word themselves. I just refused to lose them.
Why It Was Created
The full name is My ADA Matters. The web address is just the short version, adamatters.com.
I did not build this site by myself. I had the complete support of Vaulted, LLC. There were three reasons for building it.
First, I had to have it. Without their support I could not communicate at all. I write with voice software and assistive technology because of my hands. Vaulted handled the complete logistics of putting this record into a form my software can read, and into a form others can use too, people who need to complain but have no mechanism, like me.
Second, it saved money. I had already paid this state hundreds of dollars for records that never came, and paid again to correct mistakes that were never mine. Proving the same facts to the same offices, one overnight envelope at a time, cost more than the records were ever worth. One place I control costs a fraction of that.
Third, and this is the one worth sitting with. I needed an accessible site because theirs were not accessible to me. I could not reliably use their websites or their forms with my assistive technology. One complaint form even came with a CAPTCHA barrier I had to report, and the answer was to send me back to the same form. Others gave me no accessible way I could find to complain at all. Read that again. The place a disabled person goes to report an access barrier was itself the access barrier.
At first this record was for me. Then it filled up, and I understood what it was showing.
I made it public because of where every road ended.
The State ADA Coordinator’s Office can agree with you and still cannot make anyone do anything. It has no enforcement power. Even when you are right, being right goes nowhere.
The State Bar disciplines itself. It writes its own rules, applies them as it sees fit, and moves them when it needs to. I paid to correct a mistake the Bar itself admitted making, and the Bar treated my correction like the burden.
And the City of Brookhaven still has my money.
When the referee has no whistle, the rulebook belongs to a player, and the cashier keeps what you paid for nothing, the only thing left with any power is the record itself. So the record went public.
It also addresses the people and institutions that were given the chance to step in and either did nothing or refused.
ADA Matters is a documented record of what happens when basic requests for access, written communication, and fair process turn into prolonged institutional disputes. It is a record, not a campaign.
Every entry is one event, entered once. The Timeline, each institution record, the documents, and the Open Questions ledger are all generated from those same events, so the views never drift out of sync. A primary source is the actual email, letter, receipt, or filing, and every claim links to one.
Which Georgia Institutions
Three institutions hold the record, and a fourth is the state office I turned to for help.
What Happened, in Three Parts
I asked three Georgia institutions for ordinary things. Here is what came back.
One. The Open Records
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 was asked, more than five times, who my attorney was. So I filed a request under the Georgia Open Records Act, because it was one of the only options the City left me.
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. Even after admitting the 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. 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.
When I Asked for Help
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.
What I asked for was minimal. A single point of contact. Written correspondence I could actually use. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that gave me an advantage. I offered proof of my disability from the very start, before anyone asked. They questioned it anyway, and when they could not attack me for being disabled, they went after why I wanted help at all.
I asked for equal access. They answered with accusations, harassment, and delay. So I stopped asking and started keeping. Every email. Every dodge. Every date.