DENVER - Dimitri Lucas has spent 27 months looking for a job since he moved to Colorado, but the 28-year-old autistic Colorado Springs man isn’t finding any open arms.

The former California resident worked from the time he was 18 through age 25, pulling cases in a District Attorney’s Office, handling clerical duties for Santa Barbara County schools and doing similar jobs for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He tried to work even when he was sick because he was so happy to have the opportunities, which were partially subsidized by the state, said his mother, Irene Lucas.

But after interviewing at five or six places, Dimitri Lucas found fewer people in Colorado were interested in hiring someone with a developmental disability, his mother said. She thinks employers need incentives to take a chance on what she calls the most devoted and stable part of the work force.

Two Colorado Springs Republicans may be offering solutions. State Rep. Larry Liston is working on a bill to give incentives to businesses to hire those with developmental disabilities, and Rep. Bob Gardner has proposed a program giving companies that hire significant numbers of the developmentally disabled certain state contracts without having to compete for them.

The proposals are among a bevy of ideas to address the needs of 3,746 developmentally disabled adults who remain on a waiting list for state services because there is not enough money to treat them. They range from establishment of a Medicaid buy-in program to the levying of a statewide sales tax to end the waiting list.

“The status quo is not working,” Irene Lucas said last week during a meeting in Denver of an interim legislative committee on developmental disabilities.

The most controversial plan is the .3-cent sales tax hike proposed by Rep. Michael Garcia, D-Aurora, that would generate about $264 million a year. The proposal, which would have to be approved by voters, would supplant the $171 million in annual general fund revenues that go toward helping the developmentally disabled now and would cover the estimated $72 million additional cost of clearing out the waiting list.

Gardner has put up what many consider to be an opposing plan that would put an additional $1 million of already existing funds toward developmental disability programs next year and would seek increased funding for the next four years after that.

He calls it a more realistic option, but a number of disabled-advocacy groups have said they will support Garcia’s plan, arguing that Gardner’s doesn’t supply enough money to make a significant dent in the services backlog.

Regardless of which of those plans advances, Gardner is trying to break ground with another bill that could lead to more state-funded jobs, such as clerical work, food services, landscaping or laundry, being awarded to what is known as the “DD” community.

His proposal would require that the state create a list of jobs that could be done by the developmentally disabled and transmit that list to nonprofit companies that then could bid on them. If at least 75 percent of the company workers that would handle that job are developmentally disabled, the bidding process would be closed and that company would get the contract if it could agree with the state on a reasonable compensation.

The state now has bidding preferences, allowing businesses owned by veterans, for example, to get the job if their bid is higher than others but within a certain percentage range of the low bidder. There are no set-aside programs like what Gardner is proposing, in which only companies with certain employees are eligible for contracts.

Gardner’s biggest hurdle in passing the bill may be the way he defines which companies are eligible for the setasides.

Disabled advocates such as Beverly Hirsekorn of the Colorado Developmental Disabilities Council say that by requiring that such high percentages of workers be disabled, the bill forces the disabled into sheltered and segregated workshops instead of pushing them into the work force and helping them become more selfsustaining by interacting with nondisabled adults.

“The problem right now in Colorado is we don’t have the funds to help people get jobs in the regular community,” said Bob Lawhead, vice president for the Colorado Association of Persons in Supported Employment.

Irene Lucas argued, however, that for those who are more severely disabled, integrating the work force is not as important as finding a job, period. She said there is a “terrible, urgent, critical need of people with developmental disabilities to work.”

Liston’s proposal, which is not likely to generate as much controversy, is still being fleshed out. Essentially, he hopes to be able to allow employers to deduct from their tax bills a certain percentage of what they pay developmentally disabled employees as an incentive to hire them.

The bill is likely to suggest the program be launched as a pilot in just a few counties. He thought of the idea after attending a forum with disabled advocates in May and getting the message that they need help finding jobs, he said.

CONTACT THE WRITER: (303)837-0613 or ed.sealover@gazette.com