By Keith Whitcomb Jr.
Staff Writer
Vermont Legal Aid has asked the state to bring back a moratorium on utility disconnections that expired in October.
“Given how bad the pandemic has gotten, we can’t afford to have anyone homeless, and people need access to their vital utility services,” said David Koeninger, deputy director of Vermont Legal Aid.
The petition was filed on Friday, he said.
The moratorium on utility disconnections was put into place by the Public Utility Commission in March and was extended a number of times until October, when the Department of Public Service and several utilities asked for it to be allowed to expire. The reasoning then was that people could turn to the Vermont COVID-19 Arrearage Assistance Program, which they didn’t appear to be doing much at the time.
The program used CARES Act funding, and it ends on Tuesday. Visit bit.ly/VCAAP2020 online to find the online application.
Vermont Legal Aid won’t be alone in asking the PUC to reinstate the moratorium. Ben Edgerly Walsh, climate and energy program director at Vermont Public Interest Research Group said his organization and about half dozen others plan to sign onto the petition come Monday.
“The stated rationale for allowing it to expire is just no longer applicable after the middle of next week, and the ground has entirely shifted under us,” Walsh said. “When it was allowed to expire, we weren’t going into the winter, there were single-digit numbers of COVID cases per day in Vermont, it was just a totally different moment for the pandemic here in Vermont.”
COVID-19 cases and deaths have been on the rise across the country since the end of October. Congress has been slow to act on a new coronavirus relief bill, and unemployment benefits are expiring soon.
Green Mountain Power, the state’s largest electric utility, and some others have publicly stated they’ve imposed their own moratoriums on disconnections.
GMP Spokeswoman Kristen Kelly said Friday the utility will not disconnect anyone through the end of the year and will revisit the policy regularly, as it has since March.
“There are a lot of families feeling the effects of this pandemic,” she said, adding that the company would rather work with its customers than disconnect them. She said thousands of GMP customers have used the Vermont COVID-19 Arrearage Assistance Program and she encouraged anyone to apply before the deadline.
Vermont Legal Aid notes in its petition that utilities like GMP have said they won’t disconnect people, but Koeninger said the added protections need to be there still.
“From our perspective there needs to be a blanket moratorium that covers everybody,” he said.
He added that the PUC had required utilities to work out payment plans with those in arrears giving them a longer period of time to pay off the bills, but this doesn’t help people who have, or will, lose all of their income.
Wanting to keep people in their homes is what’s driving much of this petition, said Koeninger, but people who need remote services are vulnerable, too.
“The other piece of this is so much of education is centered around access to the internet and obviously electricity as well,” he said. “If your family doesn’t have internet access or your family has to be without electricity for a few days, you’re not going to be able to go to school.”
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