Utility assistance program gets $192K

The Department of Community and Cultural Affairs’ program that provides utility assistance to low-income families has been awarded $192,324 in annual funding, according to Delegate Gregorio Kilili C. Sablan (Ind-MP).

In an interview at the Domestic Violence Awareness Month’s Day of Unity over the weekend, Sablan told Saipan Tribune that the Low Income Household Energy Assistance Program was awarded the funds by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Sablan said the $192,324 will be for this fiscal year 2015, which began this month.

“This is 90 percent of expected annual funding and the rest should be appropriated when U.S Congress resumes in November,” he said.

Sablan was able to secure the increased funding for LIHEAP of about four times more by citing CNMI and DCCA-LIHEAP data, which showed that there should be more funding for the program.

“I spearheaded this and got the other delegates from other insular areas, and worked with DHHS to get the formula change and get some more money for the CNMI,” Sablan said.

In 2011, Sablan wrote legislation, HR 3063, requiring DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allocate at least 30 percent of national home energy grants, called Leveraging Incentive Grants, to the U.S territories, supplementing the LIHEAP grant. This bill had nine co-sponsors.

Sablan then wrote a formal petition to Sebelius later in 2011 to allocate the full 0.5 percent of LIHEAP funding permitted by law. At that time, the CNMI was only granted a minimum of 0.135 percent of what the law allowed.

Sablan and other territory leaders managed to convince Sebelius to approve the new formula by providing her with data of poverty levels in the U.S. insular areas, which showed it to be three to five times the national average while the price of electricity is two to four times higher.

“We did that because we had the data, the decision was then made to increase it by four times, so we didn’t just increase the amount going to LIHEAP beneficiaries but also increased the number participants by 120 and I know that there is more and little by little we are getting there and 120 of them are new to the program,” Sablan told Saipan Tribune.

According to Sablan, about 120 NMI households were added to LIHEAP last year.