Relief agencies overwhelmed

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Relief agencies overwhelmed

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Posted at 10:41 p.m. PST Friday, March 16, 2001

BY ED POPE

Mercury News

Grace Ferrante doesn't take home a big paycheck, but she carefully ekes out a decent living for herself and her two young children. She pays modest rent -- by Silicon Valley standards -- for a two-bedroom apartment. There's not much left at the end of the month from the paycheck she earns as a property manager, but the family gets by.

Last month, the California energy crisis made getting by a crapshoot. ``I had to make a choice,'' Ferrante said. ``Pay the rent or pay the electric bill.'' She paid the rent. On Feb. 26, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. shut off her gas and electricity.

She wasn't alone. Nearly 15,000 PG&E customers had their power shut off in January -- roughly a 15 percent increase in shutoffs systemwide compared with the same month a year ago. Faced with bills double what they were used to paying -- or worse -- the state's working poor are weighing equally unappealing options: Risk a shutoff, or accept the kind of handout they've resisted until now.

For Ferrante and others like her, help comes from a short list of agencies that have been swamped in recent weeks by requests from low-income families, the sick, seniors and others desperate to keep the lights on.

``I've never been on assistance,'' said Ferrante, a single mother of a son, 9, and daughter, 7, whose income is well below the minimum level for federal aid for a family of three. But this time she had to ask for help. ``I just wanted my electricity on,'' she said.

In Ferrante's case it was the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program at Economic and Social Opportunities (ESO), a non-profit social-service agency and one of the last survivors of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

Agencies seek help

The agency is getting 30 to 40 applications a day from people whose power has been shut off or who have an impending shutoff notice. Before bills began to skyrocket, the agency saw about half that demand. And the bills are so large that the San Jose non-profit has been forced to turn to other agencies to share the burden. Among groups helping out are the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and a coalition of about 40 Santa Clara County churches.

``This is absolutely, positively the worst I've ever seen it,'' said Tommy Fulcher, agency president. ``There's been nothing close in my 20 years here. It's the worst both in numbers of people affected and in the size of the bills they're having to deal with.''

PG&E's shutoff of 14,858 households in January, the most recent month available from the utility, is a small percentage of its 5.5 million customers. But it's an indication of the pain the huge increases in utility bills are causing.

As a percentage of monthly income, utility bills are costing low-income households 17 percent to 45 percent of their income. Typically, it used to be 7 percent to 15 percent, according to Economic and Social Opportunities.

The utility does try to help -- to a point. PG&E spokeswoman Staci Homrig said she could not discuss individual cases, but as a general rule the utility will ``spread payments out over several months as long as the customer has a good payment history.''

The Jose Borrayo family saw its usual winter PG&E bill rise from $125 a month to $480 in February. With four young children, an income of $2,600 a month and rent of $1,400 a month on their three-bedroom home in East San Jose, ``that was too much money,'' said Silvia Borrayo, whose husband is a construction laborer.

The Borrayos thought part of the problem was a leaking hot-water faucet, and asked PG&E to let them make payments on the bill. ``They didn't want to help. It's not their problem, it's my problem,'' Borrayo said.

Economic and Social Opportunities and the Red Cross combined to help the family pay off more than $700. Now, ``We don't turn on the heater. At night, it's very cold in the house, but we don't turn it on,'' she said.

Since the first of the year, the budget for Economic and Social Opportunities has sagged under the weight of its unprecedented caseload. The agency has about $1.4 million to help low-income people with energy bills this year, and its biggest fear is the money will run out long before the crisis ends.

The agency was so swamped with requests for help that it stopped mailing out applications midway through February and again this month. It couldn't process the overload.

``You really get a sense of just how much this is affecting people,'' said Margaret Tamisiea, vice president of the agency. ``They're coming from Mountain View, driving up from Gilroy. We're swamped with more clients than we can possibly serve.''

The situation this month is no better.

Fridays are particularly bad because ``everybody is here with their shutoff notices,'' hoping to avoid having their power cut off on the weekend, she said.

Average bills, according to the agency, are running $200 to nearly $500 a month, with cumulative totals from two or three months doubling that amount. Consumers are so far in arrears that the agency has had to work with other community groups to split the payments.

``We had one family with a bill of over $2,000,'' said Paul Tatsuta, director of housing and energy. ``Before, one agency could serve a family. Now, we have to piece the payments together. If somebody comes in with a $600 bill and we can only pay $200, we call other agencies to share in the payment.''

That's one of the roles the REACH program fills. REACH, which stands for Relief for Energy Assistance Through Community Help, was started by PG&E and is administered by the Salvation Army at 170 offices throughout Northern and central California. It was funded by the utility, its employees and by donations from customers. But the recently financially strapped utility ceased making contributions.

In the first six weeks of this year, it distributed more than $900,000 to people who needed immediate help, almost as much as it spent in the first three months last year. ``Our calls for assistance have doubled over last winter,'' said director Nancy Udy. ``Usually the clients we help are in a medical emergency or have lost their jobs. Right now, it's people who are working but having a hard time making ends meet.''

Udy recalled the plight of an elderly man and his wife living on a small fixed income who didn't know what a shut-off notice was -- until the crisis hit and they got their first one. ``They were literally at the point of choosing between paying their PG&E bill or not eating,'' she said. ``It gives me chills to think of that.''

Problems in summer

Besides the overwhelming number of requests they're getting and the shortage of funds to meet the demand, there's another limit for the REACH and ESO programs: They only can help each household once in a 12-month period. That limit could mean a crisis of another sort as the temperature rises this summer.

``If it gets real hot, a lot of seniors will have to have air conditioning,'' said Fulcher. ``We have to hold onto some of our money to guard against that.

Programs like that of Economic and Social Opportunities are ``really just a Band-Aid,'' Fulcher said. ``What needs to happen is to have energy costs tiered to income. That's the only long-term solution. No one is coming in here making $50,000 a year and getting their bill paid. These are poor people whose household income is 60 percent or less of the median state income.''

As for Ferrante, she felt so badly about having to ask for help that she accepted only partial payment from the agency and came up with $400 to pay the rest of her bill.

Then PG&E dropped the other shoe.

The company requires a deposit if a customer has had the power shut off. Usually, that's twice the amount of the customer's biggest bill during the past year. For Ferrante, that came to $508. ``Would you believe they've given me until April 11 to pay it? They are taking the blood from me,'' said Ferrante, who moved to Silicon Valley from New York and has no one here she can turn to.

``There is no way I could pay this. I am stressing.''

Contact Ed Pope at epope@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5641.

-- Swissrose (cellier3@mindspring.com), March 17, 2001


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