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Demand for emergency utility aid at unprecedented high
The Utility Emergency Services Fund ran through more than a third of its budget in its first two weeks.
Demand for emergency utility aid at unprecedented high
As we reported this spring, federal funding cuts translated to some pretty impossible choices for the city and its Office of Housing and Community Development. One of those choices: Cutting the budget of the Utility Emergency Services Fund, which helps very low-income people pay their utility bills and, by extension, sometimes avoid homelessness. Well, the impact of that cut may manifest itself sooner than expected: Demand for utility assistance is at a record high, and UESF ran through more than a third of its budget in its first two weeks of the season. If the fund is empty (as seems likely) before the moratorium on heat-related utility shut-offs begins Dec. 1, some Philly families could find themselves out in the cold.
In the two weeks from Oct. 5 to 18, UESF spent $399,700 of its $1.07 million budget. They've been giving out about $40,000 a day, all of which is matched by the utility companies, to help people whose utilities either had been terminated or were on the verge of being terminated. That represents a 25 percent increase in daily demand from this time a year ago, according to UESF executive director John Rowe.
"There's more need out there, because of the other kinds of cuts that have happened. When cuts happen with food stamps or cuts happen in other areas, it affects the family's total budget. The need spreads," Rowe says. "Famlies will take what would be dedicated to paying their electric bill, and they'll use it to make up the gap for General Assistance or to pay for food." General Assistance is the $205-a-month state cash welfare program that Gov. Corbett removed from this year's budget.
UESF's fund's budget went from $1.525 million in fiscal 2011, to $1.375 million in fiscal 2012, before being cut again this year. The cuts were a byproduct of a 17 percent reduction in Philly's federal Community Development Block Grant funding.
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