Brrr! A Picture of Low-Income Heating Assistance in Oregon

It’s that time of year when heaters start running and bills start climbing. This can be either a mild annoyance if we are making it reasonably well financially, or a real serious problem if we’re not. We sat down to talk about low-income energy assistance programs with Jim Abrahamson, the Oregon Energy Partnership Coordinator for Community Action Partnership of Oregon. He is in the process of putting together the Snapshot of Energy Assistance for CAPO, due to be released on January 28, 2009 (update: here’s a link to the Jan. 2009 Snapshot). He gave us a better picture of what the low-income heating assistance programs are in Oregon, and how that landscape has changed in this fiscal year.

Oregon ranks 28th in the nation in terms of people living in poverty. Out of 3.4 million citizens (numbers based on the 2000 census), almost 12% of Oregonians qualified as living under the federal poverty line, a very low bar, and just under 15% of our state’s children. These Oregon residents, and many others who don’t fall under the line but are just struggling to get by, will have difficulty heating their homes as the temperatures drop this winter. This is nothing new: in 2007, 436,000 households qualified for low-income assistance. The catch is that 2007 resources to help these households was available to meet only about 23% of requests, less than one quarter of what was needed, before the funding ran out. We hope that we can do better than that this upcoming winter. And we actually have reason to believe this is possible.

First let’s talk about the state’s own heating assistance programs. The Oregon Energy Assistance Program (OEAP) is a fund raised by a small (50 cents) line item charge on the bills of Portland General Electric and Pacific Power customers to help those with electric heat and financial need. The Oregon Legislature (with encouragement from CUB and CAPO) increased this pot of heating assistance from $10 million to $15 million in 2007.

If you have gas heat in your home, but no money to pay the increasingly hefty gas bills, your natural gas utility should have an assistance program to help you. If you are a NW Natural customer, and meet certain income guidelines, the Oregon Low-Income Gas Assistance program (OLGA) is for you. Both OLGA and OEAP are year-round programs, but of course most activity is seen in the colder months. NW Natural’s half a million customers contributed $4 million dollars, also through a small line-item charge, to help others in need. This is a one-time increase of almost 100% over last year’s funding, again negotiated by CUB and CAPO.

Oregon’s two smaller natural gas companies, Cascade and Avista, also have similar programs. The AVISTA Low-Income Rate Assistance Program (LIRAP) is a ratepayer funded program that collects around $230,000 per year from the utility’s 81,000 customers for those who are having trouble paying their bills. Cascade, with 50,000 customers, is anticipating a pool of between $210,00 and $240,000 in low-income assistance funding.

To those who would prefer not to be contributing to a low-income fund (and there aren’t many we’ve heard), CUB notes that all customers pay for the cost of shut offs, reconnections and unpaid bills.  Keeping a customer on the system is often cheaper than disconnecting them. Plus, it’s a meaningful and easy way to help those in a tight spot. If, on the other hand, you would like to do even more to help those who are having trouble paying for heat, you can make a private donation through Oregon HEAT.

Last but by no means least is the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP, as the feds call it, or “the big enchilada,” as Jim called it). This federally funded program is doled out by Congress annually to meet heating assistance needs in every state in the nation. LIHEAP is “fuel-blind” heating assistance, meaning it can assist you with utility bills for either gas or electric heat. (For other types of heat such as oil, propane, wood customers, there is a small amount of assistance available through Oregon Heat.) LIHEAP is delivered to the Oregon Department of Housing and Community Services, then doled out to be administered by the Community Action Agencies in Oregon’s 36 counties.

After many years of struggling to get by on much less than was requested, LIHEAP is actually fully funded this year, at a level of $5 billion dollars. Each state receives LIHEAP funds according to its need (taking into account severity of climate, population, etc.) and Oregon’s portion came out to about $52 million for the upcoming winter heating season, roughly double the $26 million received for 2007-2008.

This pot of money usually lasts only through the winter season, if that long; some agencies will spend the money as quickly as requests come in, with all the money gone by March, while others will budget a specific amount per month in order to try to stretch the funds out as long as possible.

With almost twice as much money to work with this year, the agencies are needing to gear up and staff up, to distribute twice as much money to twice as many households. The goal is to have community assistance agencies spend all the funds by September 30, 2009. To that end, Oregon’s Department of Housing and Community Services has been asking the various agencies to look ahead and develop a plan to broaden their service capabilities to match the need and the funds.

So there is good news in Oregon: 10 years of working to build state low-income assistance resources has combined with full funding of LIHEAP from the federal government to ensure that we will have a decent pot of money with which to work on alleviating the problem of low-income families and fixed-income retirees facing a “heat or eat” dilemma. We would really like to do away with this difficult choice altogether.

But the truth is that even with the extra $5 million for OEAP, and the $2 million extra for OLGA, and the $26 million extra for LIHEAP, chances are slim that we will actually be able to assist every family in Oregon in need of help. Funding is up, but so is unemployment. There has also been considerable upward pressure on energy prices. Finally, to quote Jim again, “We haven’t seen the teeth of the winter yet. Last winter was long but fairly mild.” If we get really low temperatures, the need for heat, and heating assistance, will balloon.

Jeff Bissonnette, CUB’s Organizing Director, described the outlook for our upcoming winter assistance: “If we can serve 40% of the need, that’s tremendous [up from less than 25% last year]. But that still leaves a huge need unmet. How do you reduce that unmet need? We help people actually reduce their energy usage. So another part of the answer is weatherization.”

But that is another discussion for another day.

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