TURNED ON Plan offers temporary utility help to the poor BY BRIAN C. JONES

Hundreds of households that have had gas or electric service turned off because they can’t afford past-due utility bills have an opportunity to get turned back on for less money than usually required. But they’ll have to act fast: arrangements with gas and electric companies have to be made by August 15.

Under the temporary program — enacted in the closing days of the General Assembly session — very poor households can pay 20 percent down on back bills, instead of payments of 25 percent to 100 percent. They then have up to two years to pay remaining balances, reducing monthly payments.

Henry Shelton, the activist who as long pushed for a permanent solution to the thousands of shutoffs to poor families, says the measure will aid a number of households.

"It’s positive, in the sense it helps some people get turned on," says Shelton, from his George Wiley Center in Pawtucket, which works on solutions to poverty. "But it’s just a bad system," he says of the overall situation in which families find themselves without gas or electricity every year, sometimes for weeks or months, because they’ve fallen behind.

Indeed, the law allowing lower turn-on standards was all that supporters could get the General Assembly and Governor Donald L. Carcieri to sign onto this year.

Left untouched was a bill creating a three-year program aimed at 11,000 poor households — at a cost of nearly $9 million — to subsidize monthly and back bills. A committee convened by Carcieri, and headed by the Reverend John E. Holt, executive minister of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, developed the concepts. But the measure had opposition from some oil dealers, who would have seen a first-time surcharge for their share of the program, and the governor’s office reportedly had reservations about the program’s size.

Holt acknowledges the proposed program was large and complex, and its introduction late in the legislation session created fatal hurdles. He recently convened his committee to talk about "perfecting" the measure next year.

Christopher J. Medici, a New England Gas Company spokesman, says that about 60 households have taken advantage of the temporary program so far. The company is mailing information to about 800 eligible customers.

Here’s how the program would help a family — using the example of a working mother featured in an earlier Phoenix article (see "Cold comfort," News, June 10, 2005):

A customer representative for a jewelry company, she owed $1795; under normal rules, she needed $608 for a down payment, and monthly installments of $206 for her current and back bills. Under the 20 percent program, she would need a down payment of $385, with installments of about $167. (The woman subsequently raised enough money to get service restored, a Wiley center official says.)

Shelton and others believe the real issue is how families simply can’t pay their regular bills, and without subsidies, they’ll continue building big back bills, and continually get turned off.