Turn Up the Heat for LIHEAP Funds:
Cuts mean much longer winter for needy

The Times-Tribune (Scranton, PA)
August 15, 2002

Only 132 days until Christmas!

No, we’re not rushing the season. And the latest heat wave to envelope the region doesn’t produce visions of a blazing hearth or herald that dreaded sound of the furnace clicking on. But winter approaches. Cold weather is closer than you might care to think.

Now is the time for Congress to appropriate the money that will help millions of Americans make it through the winter, and this year the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program faces the prospect of a severe budget cut.

LIHEAP provides partial funding to help low-income individuals pay their heating bills. As it works out statistically, that group broadly is defined as the working poor, with a large segment of older residents.

The program is particularly important to Pennsylvania, the second largest recipient of the federal funds, After New York. According to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, $114.1 million in LIHEAP grants have been distributed to 295,000 Pennsylvania households during this fiscal year, with the average grant covering less than 25 percent of each household’s home heating costs.

According to PPL Electric Utilities, 111,476 of those households included adults 60 or older and 95,223 of them included at least one disabled person.

Clearly, this assistance goes to folks who struggle to meet their families’ basic needs. PPL, for example, said that even with LIHEAP grants, 3,173 of its customers still had past-due accounts when the program period ended this year — more than a quarter of all of its LIHEAP customers.
In the proposed budget for the next fiscal year, the Bush administration has proposed reducing national LIHEAP funding — which also helps to pay for cooling assistance in some parts of the country — from $1.7 billion to $1.4 billion.

Because Pennsylvania is one of the largest recipients of LIHEAP funds, that reduction would have a major impact here. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association projected that funds would be available for 243,000 households in the state, rather than the 295,000 served this year. That 18 percent reduction would leave 52,000 households in the cold.

Worse yet, the funding reduction has been proposed amid ongoing economic sluggishness, which likely will result in more rather than fewer households needing assistance.

Sen. Arlen Specter has played a key role in the past in preserving LIHEAP funding, and he has proposed maintaining the $1.7 billion level. This year, Rep. Don Sherwood, the Republican who represents the sprawling 10th District, has the opportunity to play a major role because he is a member of the House Appropriations Committee.

The LIHEAP program is effective. It should have a funding level high enough to deal with temperature extremes, shaky economic conditions and jittery international relations that could adversely affect the price of fuel oil at any time. Mr. Sherwood should lead the fight in the House for a funding level at least as high as that proposed by Mr. Specter in the Senate.