Last week we put up an open letter explaining what is happening to No More Cafe, out of frustration, because after a year we finally came to the conclusion that we will have to bite the bullet and spend money we don't have to make this go away. We did it to put a name on a problem that has been quietly bleeding small businesses everywhere for years without a sign of slowing down, and we figured a few hundred people might read it.

It turned out a lot of people did. The response was kind, the messages from other owners were brutal, and most of it was variations of the same theme. Dozens of you reached out to share your own version of the story, which was nearly identical every time: a letter from a federal court, a lawyer no one had met, a "customer" who had never been to the establishment, a complaint full of allegations that did not quite match the space, a settlement number set just below the cost of fighting it.

What I also found interesting was how many of you suggested I contact my representatives. Like it was a revelation. Like nobody had ever thought of that. I did not plan to write a second post. After a year of being on the receiving end of this, I have spent more hours on research than I care to admit, and for everyone who still believes phoning your assemblyman moves the needle on something like this, this one is for you.

There are roughly a million small businesses in New York State. Federal ADA Title III filings against them run in the low thousands per year. As a percentage that is small enough to be invisible. As a phenomenon it is everywhere if you ask the right people. It is the exact kind of problem politicians never have to face, because nobody who has not been hit knows it exists, and the people who have been hit have already paid to make it go away.

So when you start trying to figure out who would actually move on a problem like this, you start with the people who represent the block where you live and work. Walk through what is there.

The cure-period bill that does exist at the state level is called S.3237. It is sitting in the drawer of a state senator named James Skoufis, who chairs the committee where it lives. It has been sitting there for more than fifteen months. He has not scheduled a hearing. He has not publicly mentioned the bill once. His stated chair priorities are pharmacy benefit managers, ticketing scams, utility rates, and housing discrimination. Worthy fights, all of them. This one is not on his list.

The bill's own sponsor is a Rochester state senator named Jeremy Cooney. He has introduced this exact text three times. 2021, 2023, 2025. It has never received a hearing in any of them. Last June he put out a press release titled "Senator Cooney Finishes The 2025 Senate Session Strong." His own bill is not mentioned in it. The advocacy group that is supposedly lobbying for it still has the wrong bill numbers on its website. The man whose name is on the only piece of legislation in New York that touches this issue stopped fighting for it years ago. The opposition does not bother to fight against it. It is alive on paper and dead in fact.

Above all of them sit the two people who actually decide what gets to the floor in Albany. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. In 2025 alone, the trial lawyers' political action committee paid $25,000 to each of their political committees. The same association paid Heastie's longtime communications consultant, a man named Patrick Jenkins, $528,000 in 2025 alone, lobbying for the trial lawyers in Albany. The trial bar as a whole spent $6.5 million on New York lawmakers between 2022 and 2025. The people who decide whether the bill in Skoufis's drawer ever comes out are on a payroll funded by the firms that would lose money if it did.

Then there is Julie Menin. Two years ago she introduced the City Council bill to fund accessibility upgrades. She let it die on December 31, 2025, without a floor vote. A week later she was elected Speaker of the New York City Council. In her first major speech she said she was going to make life easier for small businesses by slashing fines and cutting red tape. She did not mention her own dead bill. Her ten priority bills for 2026 include dog waste dispensers and election deepfakes. None of them is about accessibility. As Speaker she could, if she chose, refile her own legislation tomorrow. She has decided not to.

The Attorney General of New York is Letitia James. Trial lawyers' firms and their political action committees have given her campaign $290,000. She has never publicly addressed serial ADA filers. She has never opened an investigation. She has never made a statement.

Congressman Dan Goldman represents the East Village in Washington. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee, which is the first procedural gate any bill of this kind has to clear before the full House can vote on it. In March of this year, the federal version of the cure-period bill, HR 6453, came up for that committee vote. The committee approved it 16 to 8 and sent it forward, where it is now waiting for a House floor vote that has not been scheduled. Every reporting source from the markup confirms that only one Democrat on the committee voted yes, and it was not Goldman. The Democrat who voted yes was a California congressman named Lou Correa, whose son Adan is a cast member of Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Goldman has issued no public statement about his vote.

Before getting to why none of these people acted, there is one more piece of this trap worth understanding.

A small business in New York can be sued for accessibility on two completely separate fronts. The first is physical access: ramps, bathroom dimensions, counter heights, a doorway too narrow for a wheelchair. The second is website accessibility: missing alt-text on images, navigation that does not work with a screen reader, a checkout flow that breaks for assistive devices. Different laws, different evidence, different plaintiffs, often different law firms. A pizzeria can be sued over a step at its front door one day, and sued by an unrelated plaintiff over a missing image tag on its online ordering page the next day. It happens. The two suits are not connected. The two plaintiffs do not know each other. The two firms behind them are running different volume operations against different categories of violation.

It gets worse. When a small business settles one of these lawsuits, the settlement does not mean the underlying problem got fixed. Most settlements are confidential cash payments that release the specific plaintiff from the specific case. They do not require remediation that anyone else can verify. So a business that settles one suit can be hit the very next day by a different plaintiff alleging the exact same violation, and the settlement from the first case is no defense against the second. The business pays, and the door stays open.

To give you a concrete example: the suit against me listed thirty-five things the plaintiff claimed were wrong with the space. The settlement, on top of the cash, said I needed to fix eight of them. Of those eight, six were never an issue to begin with. The other two were fixed for seven dollars at a hardware store and by moving a fixture by an inch.

On top of that doubling, every one of these claims can be filed in either federal court under Title III of the ADA, or state court under the New York State and New York City Human Rights Laws, which are actually broader than federal law and which allow monetary damages on top of attorney's fees. The lawyers shop the venue. When federal judges in Manhattan started enforcing standing rules more strictly a few years ago, one of the largest filing firms in the country, Mizrahi Kroub, shifted most of its filings out of federal court and into state court within a single year. The pipeline does not get smaller. It just changes addresses.

This is the part that should make anyone paying attention furious. The state-level cure-period bill sitting in Skoufis's drawer for the past fifteen months only addresses website lawsuits. It would not have prevented a suit like mine, which is about a physical access barrier. There is no New York state bill on file that would have. Three sessions, two upstate sponsors, identical text every cycle, and the bill they have not bothered to move does not even cover the most basic kind of complaint anyone in this city is being sued for.

The federal bill, HR 6453, does cover both physical and digital. That is the bill Dan Goldman did not vote for in March. Even if HR 6453 somehow passed tomorrow, the lawyers would simply refile under state law, which gives them more leverage than federal law does anyway. The whole pipeline survives unless every level moves at once. None of them is moving.

A few people asked whether the judges are paying attention. The honest answer is yes, and it does not help, because they can only help at the end, and getting to the end costs too much money.

Federal judges in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York have started pushing back on these filings in real ways. Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan sanctioned one of the largest filing firms in the country for what she called "boilerplate" complaints with no factual basis. Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil began requiring plaintiffs to produce actual evidence that they had ever intended to visit the businesses they were suing. Judge Lewis Liman started dismissing these cases with prejudice so they could not be refiled. The federal courts are starting to police the volume.

The problem is the math. To benefit from a judge dismissing a case against you, you have to defend yourself long enough to get in front of that judge. Filing a motion to dismiss costs a small business owner over ten thousand dollars in legal fees before any judge ever looks at it. The settlement number on the table is usually ten to twenty thousand. By the time a judge could rule in your favor, you have already spent more defending the case than the shakedown would have cost in the first place. So roughly ninety-five percent of small businesses settle. The judges who would dismiss these cases never get to see them, because the people they would protect cannot afford the door.

There is no cavalry coming. Not from the council, not from the Assembly, not from the Senate, not from Congress, not from the Attorney General, not even from the federal judges who would help if they could be reached.

Every person walked through above had a chance to act. None of them did. They have two reasons for what they did, and both deserve to be said out loud.

The first is that they do not think this matters enough to spend political capital on. There are about a million small businesses in New York, and only a few thousand get hit each year. The pain is real, it is concentrated, and it is invisible to everyone who is not on the receiving end. There is no rally for this. There is no march. There is no caucus. A politician who pushes reform gets no donations, no endorsements, and no votes they would not have gotten anyway.

The second is that they are afraid of the attack ad. Every politician who has ever voted for any procedural change to the ADA knows what is coming. A coalition letter signed by 236 advocacy organizations lands in their inbox the same day. A primary challenger uses the vote against them in the next cycle. A Long Island congressman named Tom Suozzi learned this in 2017. He cosponsored the federal cure-period bill, was hit by disability advocates within months, withdrew his name, voted no on final passage, and had his spokesperson publicly insist he "fully supports the ADA." Every New York Democrat watched it happen. None of them has cosponsored a cure-period bill since.

That is the whole answer. They do not think it matters enough, and they are afraid of the ad. The bill is in the drawer. The senators have already voted. The Speaker abandoned hers. The Attorney General has been silent. The congressman did not vote for it this spring. The judges who could help cannot be reached, because the cost of getting in front of one is higher than the cost of giving up.