Breaking Down Barriers Legislation Would Allow People With Disabilities To Earn More Money Without Losing Government Benefits

Bob Chambers would like to work more. Unfortunately, he can’t afford to.

Chambers, who has cerebral palsy, receives both Social Security and Medicare benefits. If he works full time, he will lose his medical benefits, regardless of whether his wages and job benefits are enough to make up the difference.

That’s why Chambers does volunteer work for VISTA as a computer networks specialist at the Northeast Community Center. He makes computers accessible to people who have been left out of the technological revolution.

“My only other option was to sit at home and do nothing,” he says. “If I didn’t (and worked) I would lose my benefits and my ability to live on my own.”

Chambers, who has served six years on the Washington Governor’s Council for the Disabled, hopes that will change soon.

Many people across the country have been fighting to make it easier for people with developmental and physical disabilities to go back to work without losing all of their benefits. The result, last December, was the passage of the federal Ticket to Work and Work Incentive Improvement Act. The measure has not yet been implemented.

The act will try to remove barriers to employment by creating incentives for people to return to work. Rather than losing all benefits when they exceed set wage levels and hour caps, people with disabilities will gradually lose a portion of their benefits as their income increases.

Local businessman Stephen L. Start was instrumental in the writing and passage of the act.

Start owns S.L. Start, which provides employment training and placement and residential services for people with disabilities. The firm employs about 700 people in Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

A recent government program administered by S.L. Start, called Projects with Industries, returned more than 2,000 Inland Northwest people to work, more than half of whom received government assistance.

But programs like that only go so far, says Start. For 20 years, Start has fought a system that made it hard for many of his company’s clients to work more than a few hours a week.

“They were probably the most underutilized and overlooked group of people I had ever met,” says Start. “But they would literally go broke if they lost their benefits.”

Earlier this month Start was appointed by U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., to a 12-member federal advisory panel that will oversee implementation of the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act.

The act, says Start, began with ideas that he and a fellow activist scribbled on the back of a place mat at a Chinese restaurant on North Division.

Start took a refined version of those ideas across the country to groups and individuals working to improve access to employment for people with disabilities. The end result was the Ticket to Work Act.

In its first five years, Start estimates the act could affect 400,000 people nationwide.

In Spokane County alone, more than 7,000 people with disabilities received federal supplemental security income (SSI) in January. While not all of those people have the interest or potential to work, Start says the new law will help many begin working to support themselves.

“Where they are going to relax the amount of money someone can make while keeping their medical benefits will really help motivate people to work,” says Linda Brennan, director of Nova Services, a local company that provides employment training and placement services to people with disabilities. “It’s a step toward full self-sufficiency.”

Nova Services just signed a contract with Boeing to perform subcontract assembly work.

Many say the act couldn’t have come at a better time. With unemployment at exceptionally low levels across the country, the job market is ripe for people with disabilities to find employment.

At the Spokane Valley Wal-Mart, co-manager Susan Rose says she hires many people with disabilities to work at the store.

“They are some of our better associates,” she says, adding that she hasn’t been able to use them to their full potential. “Most of them can’t work more than 100 hours a month. That’s the only reason they ask me to cut … back (their hours) is because of their benefits.”

Meanwhile, Chambers says he is looking forward to implementation of the Ticket to Work and Work Incentive Improvement Act. He says he would like to continue working in the computer world, and jokes that he may someday take on Microsoft’s Bill Gates. His long-term goal, he adds, is to become entirely self-sufficient and to get off of public assistance programs.

“As (my life partner) puts it,” Chambers says, “I’m the only person she knows who has fought for 10 years to pay taxes.”