“Save 60 percent on your electric bill.” This bold invitation to take part in the Utility Discount Program was in my Seattle City Light (SCL) bill, written only in English. The generous discount could save customers from having electricity cut off due to unpaid bills. Last year, unpaid bills led to almost 7,000 customers having their power shut off. Unfortunately, programs to assist low-income people have historically fallen short in enrolling eligible customers.
Since the late 1970s, savvy, low-income utility customers have been able to reduce the cost of electric service (by 60 percent) and water/sewer/garbage service (by 50 percent) by grinding through an arduous application and then waiting out a months’ long review process. Many months. While some policy changes were made in early 2013, the program remains overly complex and elusive.
A January 2013 article in “AgeWise King County,” a monthly e-newsletter published by the Seattle-King County Advisory Council on Aging and Disability Services, reported that about 14,000 Seattle households received rate discounts. Compare this to the estimated 55,000 Seattle households Councilmember Mike O’Brien suggested were eligible for the program in February. And those are only Seattle households.
SCL and Seattle Public Utilities also serve tens of thousands of households outside Seattle — in Shoreline and Lake Forest Park to the north; and to the south, most of Burien, portions of Normandy Park, SeaTac, Tukwila, Renton and all of unincorporated Highline and Skyway. The southern communities contain possibly the highest proportion of income-eligible households in the utility service area.
SCL estimates there are enough eligible customers to more than double discount participation to nearly 33,000 — but, according to O’Brien, some 22,000 more Seattle households could still be helped. But does this ignore the large pool of income-eligible customers outside the city limits?
SCL’s goal of adding 1,700 more participants each year means it would take more than 11 years to double enrollment; to reach the 55,000 eligible households suggested by O’Brien would require an additional 13 years. That would be 2037. Thousands of eligible households will continue suffering shutoffs for inability to pay; thousands more will drop off the program. At this rate, doubling current participation looks downright elusive.
Even if SCL were truly invested in ramping up participation, the program itself is its own worst enemy. The marketing effort is and always has been low key: an insert with the bill. Outreach efforts include additional passive strategies. No wonder 41,000 people don’t get help. Let’s tap into one of the most extensive and active communication networks we have: schoolchildren.
For U.S. Census Year 2010, the Highline School District reported more than 5,300 families living in poverty, representing nearly 18 percent of the district’s residents. With the largest district population living within SCL service areas, an outreach effort to the schools to reach the parents and guardians of these students might satisfy three years’ worth of enrollment goals in one easy swoop.
After the stealth marketing effort, the next biggest impediment to enrollment is the application process. Earlier this year, the city council reduced the five-page application to two pages, and authorized three-year approval for seniors. However the program remains burdened with barriers to qualification and customer verification.
Participants in Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or other programs can’t get enrolled without additional evidence of need. They must jump through more hoops, provide more documentation and wait to be deemed the deserving poor; all the while generating ever more costly and time-consuming administrative busy work for its own sake.
So why doesn’t Mayor Mike McGinn or the Seattle City Council just make the program less cumbersome and less expensive to manage? O’Brien’s answer to this, which appeared in Real Change early this fall (“Overpaying for power,” RC, Sept. 18), was that the “small bite approach is where we are.” And O’Brien says that with a straight face, as one of nine self-identified progressives on the council. Not that a small bite approach was necessary to ban phone books. Nope, that was so vital it was done in one big bite.
For many years, city leaders have allowed the utility rate discount program to languish and wallow in its own ineptitude. Possibly, phone books and bike lanes really are more vital issues than fighting poverty.