DPW to work with Peco to avoid utility shutoffs for poor

Nearly 14,000 low-income Philadelphia families are waiting for the state to process their claims for federal home-energy assistance - a repeat of last year's backlog that state officials had promised would not happen again.

About 8,000 of the families have been waiting for more than 90 days.

Because the payments are late, some people face a shutoff of their gas and electricity. Even if the bills eventually get paid, those whose utilities are turned off may be compelled to pay reconnection fees on top of the initial bills, a situation that could be catastrophic for poor people unable to meet even basic needs, advocates say.

"People are going to be without hot water and a stove," said Lance Haver, director of the city Office of Consumer Affairs. "The human and financial costs are inexcusable."

After being told by The Inquirer on Tuesday that a number of people, including Haver, had criticized the state as risking utility disconnections for the poor, officials announced a change in long-standing policy Thursday night.

In an unusual move, the Department of Public Welfare, which distributes the home-energy assistance money known as LIHEAP, said it would work with Peco to hold off on terminations in certain circumstances.

A Peco official said he was surprised by the last-minute change, which could keep some of the utility's 693,000 Philadelphia customers from losing power. DPW officials did not say whether they had made the same arrangement with the Philadelphia Gas Works, whose officials could not be reached Thursday.

"We are working hard to make sure that people do not meet unnecessary hardships and are working diligently at completing all LIHEAP applications," a DPW spokeswoman said via e-mail.

She added that DPW had spread the work of processing Philadelphia's many LIHEAP applications among various county assistance offices. The agency expects all applications to be completed by June.

Last year, after a similar backlog, DPW officials promised the problem would not recur this year.

LIHEAP is 100 percent federal money, paid to the utility, not to the customer. Pennsylvania received $184.6 million in such funding last year.

Last year, then-DPW Secretary Gary Alexander told the legislative Budget and Finance Committee the department had "experienced some unforeseen issues" because of a new computer system that caused delays in processing LIHEAP applications.

"Please be assured these issues are being addressed so they will not be repeated next year," he said in a June 2012 letter. "Application processing and time frames will be closely monitored to ensure the timely processing of applications."

Alexander resigned in February.

In March, lawyers with Community Legal Services calculated that the backlog of people waiting three months or more for LIHEAP grants was 40 percent higher this year than last.

"The fact is there was a commitment to solve this issue and they failed," legal services lawyer Robert Ballenger said this week.

Haver and other advocates suggested DPW suffered from a shortage of caseworkers handling LIHEAP applications, especially in Philadelphia, where the bulk of the backlog exists.

The DPW spokeswoman declined to provide a reason for the backlog.

Technically, a wait list of more than 30 days is a violation of state rules that say a person's LIHEAP application must be processed within that time frame, according to Harry Geller, chairman of the LIHEAP advisory committee with the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project. The project is a nonprofit that assists low-income consumers in energy matters.

"There's a backlog higher than we should expect or state rules require," Geller said. "The reality is it's the consumer who's hurt."

Yahaira Serrano, 31, a mother of two, faced a Peco shutoff in April. Serrano, who lives in the Northeast, said she applied for LIHEAP in November but was on the waiting list until May 6.

That's when she was told her application had been denied, in part because she made too much money. Given that she is a laid-off home health aide who made $9,000 last year - most of it in unemployment insurance - that seemed unlikely. LIHEAP is available to people who make 150 percent of the federal poverty level (around $28,000 for a family of three).

Serrano appealed the DPW ruling with a lawyer from Legal Services and won. She also got a reprieve from Peco and worked out a payment plan. But overall, she said, the experience was "real bad," adding, "I was stressed."

Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents agencies like DPW that distribute LIHEAP, was surprised to learn of the backlog.

"States don't tend to have backlogs," he said. "The question of backlogs has never come up to me."

To some advocates, the processing delays echo the state's problems with unemployment benefits. The federal government recently chastised Pennsylvania for its "continued failure" in paying first-time unemployment benefits in a timely fashion.