(Havre) – With winter upon us and energy bills rising New Media Broadcasters sat down with Greg Jergeson member of the board of the Energy Share of Montana and asked how bad was the problem of people not being able to heat their homes.
“Well, years ago I served on the Montana Public service commission and sometimes depending upon the severity of the winter in cases of people losing their job if the economy is on a downward turn people might lose their job and find themselves unable to meet this ongoing bill that they need to live in the kind of climate out in Montana. So, it is ongoing, thankfully there aren’t more than we have every year, but we helped 37 families last winter in the Havre area with an average support of $741 per household and that was up from $531 per household the year before.”
We also asked what the difference is between the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Energy Share.
“That’s a federal program and that provides for low-income people assistance with their utility bills. It’s an ongoing program and its based-on income of the household and contrast that with energy share which is not an ongoing program but is based on a circumstance that occurs that hadn’t been there before. And so those two programs they can work in conjunction, and we do encourage low-income people who have struggles paying their utility bills that they work with our HRDC to make sure they get tied into the LIHEAP program for utility bill assistance.”
We also asked where energy share gets the money they use to help low-income families.
“Primarily it’s from private donations. Private donations from the utility companies are money that they derived from a fee on their customers, but they use USB funds where fees were established when energy deregulation was passed by the legislature in 1997. Private individuals make donations and as a board member I get to send out thank you cards to people who make the private donations and it’s just amazing. you’ll see a number of donations all come in at the same time and it’s just people wanting to help their neighbors in Montana and that’s a wonderful thing about energy share.”
And finally, we asked if they offered help with other bills low-income families might face.
“Well, we’re talking about as our summer get warmer and we face situations maybe we’re going to need a work through a program to provide similar assistance in the summer but that’s right now in the discussion stage. we do help people in certain circumstances with getting new energy efficient furnaces and in other cases energy efficient appliances and we like to help people if we can find ways to see if their home needs to be weatherized. If there’s some low-cost ways to get proper weatherization so that their bill overall isn’t as high as it would be otherwise.”
