2,500 low-income Austin Energy customers losing discountsApr 24 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Marty Toohey Austin American-Statesman
Austin has started canceling the discounts that more than 2,500 low-income households receive on their monthly water and electric bills, despite well-publicized plans to beef up aid to struggling families. Since October, more than 1,000 households have lost those benefits, at least $40 a month. An additional 1,500 or so are expected to lose the aid by, according to Austin Energy estimates. Those customers earn less than the federal poverty line, which is $11,490 for an individual and $23,550 for a family of four. The City Council canceled those customers' discounts when establishing new eligibility guidelines last summer. But three council members said this week that the council did so inadvertently and that Austin Energy should have informed city leaders about the situation months ago. The council is scheduled to discuss the matter at its Thursday meeting. "It was a shock to me when I heard people were being disenrolled," said Council Member Kathie Tovo, who received several calls from customers surprised their discounts were ending. "It seemed to me that the council's intent was to expand the existing pool of eligible households." Thursday will probably not see the last discussion council members have about how to apportion the city-owned utility's low-income assistance. About 9,000 households were receiving discounts when Austin Energy's new rates went into effect last fall, and the program has steadily grown since then as part of a council directive to have 25,000 homes enrolled by this summer. The council is funding the expansion by more than tripling the assistance spending, to $9 million. But in rewriting the eligibility guidelines, the council had to guess how many customers would qualify for the expanded assistance program. It turns out more than 150,000 may qualify -- five times more than the program can accommodate, according to a contractor's preliminary conclusions. And, in a quirk of the new guidelines, an additional 7,000 or so customers could lose long-standing discounts because the council deemed the newly eligible customers a higher priority. That shift is scheduled to happen next month, when the contractor's report is finished. "This is an issue of allocating limited resources among a larger group of customers than the resources can serve," said Mark Dreyfus, Austin Energy's vice president for regulatory affairs and corporate communications. The homes that are now losing their monthly discounts are enrolled in one of two county public-assistance programs: the Central Health Medical Assistance Program, which offers health care services to people without health insurance who are below the federal poverty line; and the Comprehensive Energy Assistance Program, which provides federal aid to customers at 74 percent of the poverty line who have experienced a financially traumatic experience, such as a major car wreck. People enrolled in either program previously automatically received the discount. When the council rewrote Austin Energy's customer-assistance guidelines, the two county programs were deleted from the list of programs through which customers can get a discount. Tovo said she didn't know how that happened. Carol Biedrzycki, executive director of the Texas Ratepayers' Organization to Save Energy, said the result was "cutting off people ... who are the lowest-income folks in the system." "It seems to me that Austin Energy is so focused on the letter of what the council passed they've forgotten the intent," Biedrzycki said. "Why wouldn't they have brought this back to the council?" Dreyfus said the council had passed "a binding document" from which Austin Energy was expected to operate. "If upon reflection the council wants to adjust the guidelines, that is certainly up to the council, and we will respond as quickly and efficiently as possible," he said. In establishing new criteria, the council decided that customers also should be eligible for discounts if they are enrolled in Medicaid, the federal low-income health program, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly called food stamps). The council also decided that Medicaid and SNAP recipients should be a higher priority than customers receiving other forms of aid, such as the state's telephone-bill assistance program. By adding customers enrolled in Medicaid and SNAP, the council made 150,000 more customers eligible, according to the city contractor's determination. Tovo said the council expected to revisit the low-income subsidies once it knew how many people were eligible under the new guidelines. She said the council might decide to be more selective about which homes are eligible or might decide to expand the assistance programs. The subsidies are funded through a 0.172 cent per kilowatt-hour charge, which works out to about $1.72 a month for a typical home. http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=28352197 |