Building a Better Community: Creating a Voluntary Contribution Program

Can local government be a conduit for neighbors helping neighbors?

This short video popped up when I last went on YouTube. It’s a video of man asking for 24 hours to pay the last $42 of a $184 utility bill owed to the City of Piqua. The man was promptly told to visit other agencies and if he didn’t show up, he would have his utilities disconnected and pay the re-connection fee.

Stories like this are probably more common than we are lead to believe. My day job is to run one of the county’s largest human service nonprofit agencies and in 2023, our agency served over 1,100 county residents granting out over $41,000 in financial assistance specifically for rent or utility assistance. 1,100 individuals many not sound like large number, when you consider that Miami County has less than 110,000 residents, our small agency helped 1 out of every 100 residents with a utility or rent payment since January. In context, that is quite a number.

Not all Utilities are the Same

Most of the requests we get for utilities are for municipal utilities. In Piqua and Tipp City, that not only includes the traditional water and sewer services, but it also includes electric service since both of those communities have municipally owned and operated eletric systems. These systems are different from the investor owned systems that exist in our community.

One of the ways these systems are different is that both CenterPoint Energy (the region’s largest natural gas suppler) and AES Ohio (the largest investor-owned electric utility in the area) both have voluntary contribution funds to help customers that need a little help.

What are Voluntary Contribution Programs?

Voluntary Contribution Programs are funded by those small little prompts you get when you pay your bill; at least when I pay my utilities bills, I am always asked if I want to round up my bill to the next dollar, or pay an extra dollar or two to their Volntary Contribution Program. There is no requirement that I make a payment towards the fund, thus it is truly voluntary. In addition, the utilites themselves are responsible for crafting their own programs to help distribute the help to where it is needed.

Looking West

One of the issues that these publicly owned utility providers have is that there are legal arguments that they do not have the legal ability to create these programs on the local level here in Ohio. For statutory communities like Troy, this is most certainly the case. In general, statutory communities can only exercise those powers expressed in the Ohio Revised Code and the code doesn’t give publicly owned utilities an option to create a Voluntary Contribution Program.

The argument is a little more muddled for charter communities like Piqua. The general argument is that a local government can excercise those powers it wishes to unless it is in conflict with state law. Maybe a Voluntary Contribution program for a community is in conflict with state law, but I doubt it.

Nevertheless, there seems to be opportunities for communities (regardgless of whether they are charter or statutory) to begin the conversation on Voluntary Contribution Programs.

Thirty years ago, the State of Washington adopted a statue in their state code that allowed for public utility systems to create Voluntary Contribution Programs. Here is how their statue is written:

A district may include along with, or as part of its regular customer billings, a request for voluntary contributions to assist qualified low-income residential customers of the district in paying their district bills. All funds received by the district in response to such requests shall be transmitted to the grantee of the department of commerce which administers federally funded energy assistance programs for the state in the district's service area or to a charitable organization within the district's service area. All such funds shall be used solely to supplement assistance to low-income residential customers of the district in paying their district bills. The grantee or charitable organization shall be responsible to determine which of the district's customers are qualified for low-income assistance and the amount of assistance to be provided to those who are qualified

In practice, the City of Washougal, Washington (population 16,000) has one of the state’s most robust Voluntary Contribution Programs; the program provides one-time assistance per year up to $250. Applicants to the program are screened to ensure they meet this criteria:

• Total household annual income must meet the eligibility standards for the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

• The customer's household must not be receiving subsidized housing assistance.

• The person applying for Emergency Assistance must reside in the home (service address).

• The customer must have a disconnect notice, which identifies the residence as being in danger of having water service terminated due to non-payment.

Putting it All Together

I would dare say that if a community put foward a Voluntary Contribution Program, scenes like the five-minute video above would not have to occur. The people of our county are extremely generous; it’s through my involvement at the non-profit organization I run where this is evident every day.

While local governments may not have all the tools they need to institute such a program, they can at least lend their voice and champion efforts at the state level to work to create such programs that can be created here in Ohio and then begin implementing these programs on a local level here at home.

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