Date: 2006-02-14
Speaker: GENE GREEN (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: Texas

Mr. Speaker. I would like to lVring attention tonight to an issue that both the House and the Senate have been debating. Lowincome Americans are struggling to pay for heating bills this winter. Thankfully. this winter has not been as cold as expected. and heating bllig hAv6. hot increased as greatly as Lss -noticed. however. is that our lowincome Americans also struggle to pay cooling bills. When the 90- and 100H246 co: degree heat rolls around this year. the situation is going to become very critical very quickly. Air conditioners run on electricity. and a lot of electricity comes from natural gas. Natural gas prices have more than tripled in the last 3 years. from $3 to $4 per thousand cubic feet to $10 to $15. These costs are really hitting home as State public utility commissions. PUCs. are increasing fuel charges on electric bills. The need for relief is going to be intense this summer. but the Federal Governments LowIncome Home Energy Assistance Program. also called LIHEAP. is going to do next to nothing to help. For example. over 60.000 Houston area families got their power cut off in the summer of 2001 and only 14.443 people received 2001 cooling assistance statewide in Texas. E 2000 How can that be? The problem is that the LIHEAP formula is completely biased toward heating costs and ignores cooling costs. Many people believe that" LIHEAP is a cold weather State program only. In the Northeast. the Midwest coalition lobbies for it and my Northeast and Midwest colleagues talk most about the program. The media tends to cover LIHEAP funding issues only during the winter months. The shocking facts are that 3 percent of LIHEAP funding goes toward cooling homes in the summer. and 74 percent goes toward heating homes in the winter. Incredibly. LIHEAP spends three times more on administrative costs -than it spends saving lives from heatstroke. States like Texas. Florida and California that have large lowincome populations vulnerable to hot weather get almost no funding. Lowincome people in New York. Ohio and Pennsylvania receive eight or nine times as much LIHEAP per lowincome resident. In Texas. we have 3.7 million people who are eligible for LIHEAP due to income. but only 4.5 percent receive any assistance. The State of Texas canceled. its Low Income Energy Assistance Program as electric bills were on their way up. and our constituents have nowhere to turn. The cold weather bias is unacceptable. because hot weather kills just as many or more people than cold.. According to the National Weather Service. which uses media reports and local government information. from 1985 to 2000 there were 2.596 fatalities caused by heat. an average of 235 per year. and 462 fatalities caused by cold. an average of only 24 a year. It is scandalous that LIHEAP provides 3 percent of the funding for cooling. and hot weather kills 19 times more people than cold weather. However. a peerreviewed study dt the University of Delaware shows that over 1.000 people die from heat in the 15 biggest cities alone in the average summer. well over either government estimate. So neither National Weather Service nor the CDC data tells the full picture.