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PHOTO by Rocky Mountain News photographer Jose Lopez: A man (Governor Lamm) with short white hair and a mean expression, wearing a dark suit and tie stands at a podium speaking into a microphone. The front of the podium is draped with a small APTA banner.
Caption reads: Gov. Richard D. Lamm gives his views to the American Public Transit Association conference at the Denver Hilton Monday.

[Headline] Mass transit group applauds as Lamm opposes bus lifts
By Peter Blake, Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Gov. Richard D. Lamm won a standing ovation from public transportation officials Monday after telling them he’s against putting wheelchair lifts on every bus in America.

The $8 billion such lifts would cost could better be spent to “reindustrialize” America, the governor said.

Lamm’s speech to the American Public Transit Association conference at the Denver Hilton echoed themes he has struck several times in the past few weeks, to the increasing irritation of the handicapped community.

“I think he’s going to turn Republican and run for the Senate” in 1986 against Gary Hart, said Dan Mosley, a one-legged man from Victor who was among 50 people in wheelchairs outside the hotel. “Leopards don’t normally change their spots. He’s doing it for some reason. Where else can he go but the Senate?”

Lamm told 2,000 listeners how he’d declined a request by the handicapped community to sign a resolution asking APTA to make all public transit systems accessible to the handicapped.

The issue of lifts, Lamm said, is a “microcosm” of what’s wrong with America, citing some examples of the declines in industry.

“We are eclipsed in industry after industry,” he said, “cameras, watches, TV sets, radios, household appliances, automobiles, steel… On and on the list goes. It’s really costing America its great middle class.

“We live in a world of Japanese sellers and American buyers,” the governor said. “That is a prescription for poverty.”

“What shatters me the most is that it has happened on our watch, during the time you and I were the decision makers of America,” he said.

The country is “squandering” its material wealth and the next generation may inherit “a second-rate economy,” Lamm said.

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