Fuel prices hit Iowa's poor hard

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Grassroots Information Coordination Center (GICC) : One Thread

Fuel prices hit Iowa's poor hard Fuel prices race ahead of poor's ability to pay By MARY CHALLENDER Register Staff Writer

12/03/2000

If there's a safety net protecting poor Iowans from having their utilities shut off, Edna Allen dropped right through it.

The Des Moines grandmother, who suffers from terminal liver disease and other health problems, was struggling financially even before her gas and electrical services were turned off in September. Now she's on the verge of eviction from her home of 14 years and has run out of places to turn.

"Ten or 15 years ago I was cut off, but my father was living and he helped me," Allen, 48, said wistfully as she sat on the sofa in her dark apartment, wearing her coat and gloves to ward off the November cold. "I wish he were here now."

Local experts say stories like Allen's point out the shortfalls in the state's energy-assistance program. Even before heating fuel prices skyrocketed this season, the program was hard pressed to meet the barest needs of Iowa's poorest residents, said Jerry McKim, chief of the state's Bureau of Energy Assistance.

"All these rising fuel rates have done is take a crisis and turn it into a disaster," he said.

Compared with last year, the price of natural gas is up 64 percent as of November, propane is up 42 percent and heating oil is up 39 percent. With a colder winter in the forecast, utilities have predicted that Iowans face a 50 percent increase in heating bills this season.

For some, the situation has already reached health-threatening proportions. Although no one has an exact figure, interviews with energy-assistance experts indicate there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of Iowans who spent at least part of November living in unheated homes.

Among them are an elderly rural Iowa woman who began burning clothes when she ran out of wood for her stove; a Waterloo mother who took out a payday loan to get her heat back; and a Des Moines family with nine children who gather around the open burners of a gas stove to stay warm.

The children's father, Otis Killings, 33, said the family has been without heat since the furnace quit almost two years ago. Last winter, they made do with space heaters and heat from the stove, he said. When it got really cold, they'd all spend the night in a motel.

By the end of the winter, Killings, a self-employed construction worker, said he'd accumulated $1,500 in power bills and his power was shut off. Killings said he recently was able to get his power turned back on with the help of community-action groups, but his house is still without a furnace or water service.

"It's almost a nightmare situation," he said.

Several organizations in the state stand between down-on-their luck Iowans like Killings and the extremes of Iowa's harsh winters. They include the federally funded Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), county agencies, the Salvation Army, the St. Vincent de Paul Society and a handful of church-based organizations.

Together, they make less of a safety net than they do a threadbare crazy quilt - a mass of patches held together by the thinnest of threads. Even before this year, they say, the situation was dire.

"When I first started seeing people 23 years ago, I saw approximately 120 families the entire year," said Sharon Baker, director of CROSS Ministries. "Now we're averaging 120 families a month."

Last year was a warmer-than-average winter in Iowa, yet 62,000 Iowans received energy assistance from the LIHEAP program, McKim said. That was only 30 percent of those eligible.

The program recently received an emergency federal appropriation of $7.8 million. McKim said that would provide assistance to only about 10,000 more Iowans, far short of the need. In some places, such as Black Hawk County, applications are already up 33 percent over last year.

The average dollar amount of a LIHEAP grant isn't huge, just over $300 annually. Recipients, however, are given special protection from utility shutoffs. Even if they fall behind on their bills, Iowans certified for these federal funds cannot have their gas or power turned off between Nov. 1 and April 1.

Many Iowans mistakenly believe state law protects all Iowans from utility shutoffs in winter. In reality, the only defense for the average Iowan is the 20-degree rule. Utilities must delay disconnection if National Weather Service forecasts temperatures will drop below 20 degrees in the customer's area within the next 24-hour period.

When it's warmer than that, service to customers can be - and is - shut off. Last winter, MidAmerican Energy Co., which provides natural gas service to 486,000 Iowa households, stopped service to 2,600 residential and business customers for nonpayment of bills, said Teresa Anderson, manager of the company's credit and remittance-operation groups.

For most, service was reinstated the same day, she said. For those who live paycheck to paycheck, like Francies Holmes, 33, who works at a Waterloo preschool, getting heat and power back can be a much longer struggle.

Holmes, who has a 5-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son, said she accumulated $826 in heating bills when she moved, and she ended up paying two bills - one for her new place, one for her old one. A few weeks ago, she was disconnected.

For a week, as she went from agency to agency trying to get help, she and her children were without heat, she said.

"It was one of the coldest weeks," she said. "We ended up having to stay with some friends. During the evening, we'd go home and sit by candlelight. Then around 8 or 9 p.m., when it got chilly, we'd end up going over to a friend's house."

Holmes said she finally gave up, borrowed as much money as she could from friends and took out a payday loan to cover the rest of her back bill. The crisis forced her to reapply for public assistance, but she doesn't believe she had any choice.

Holmes said she and her children "could not sit like that. I couldn't let them suffer."

Relief agencies say they don't enjoy making applicants jump though hoops, but their resources are so limited, they have no choice.

"We can come up with a small portion," Baker of CROSS Ministries said. "We can't cover the entire bill. If there's someone out there with an $800 or $900 bill and he can't pay it off and he's already accessed the government programs, it's almost impossible for him to come up with the rest of the money."

Many Iowans view utility shutoffs as a sign of fiscal irresponsibility, but McKim said low-income Iowans go to great lengths to try to pay their heating bills. In a recent survey of LIHEAP recipients, more than 20 percent reported going without medical care or prescription drugs to pay the gas company, he said. Twelve percent reported going without food.

The problem, he said, is that they simply don't make enough money to pay heating bills that often consume up to 25 percent of their income.

One way to help deal with the need, McKim said, would be to use state funds to help bolster assistance programs. It's an idea that has the backing of the Governor's Task Force on Energy, which, according to co-chairman David Hurd, plans to include $10 million in state heating assistance in its recommendations to the governor this month.

Iowa House Republican leaders have already voiced their support for a different energy-assistance plan that would eliminate the state sales tax on residential utility bills.

"I intend to look closely at whatever the governor's panel presents to us," said House Speaker Brent Siegrist, R-Council Bluffs. "If it involves money, though, I'll have to see how the governor's budget works it out."

If no action is taken, people like Edna Allen could be left without many options.

Miss Edna, as she's known to her neighbors around Homes of Oakridge, makes $38 a week at her six-hour-a-week job picking up trash around the Oakridge complex. She owes MidAmerican $1,095.

If she can't pay the bill, she'll be evicted. Then, she said, she'll probably have to move in with one of her three children.

"I've got 12 grandbabies, " she said. "I like going over to their place, but I want to be able to go home

http://www.dmregister.com/news/stories/c4788998/13120571.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 03, 2000


Moderation questions? read the FAQ