Managing the $638 million low-income water & sewer assistance in the federal COVID relief package
As frequent readers of this page likely know, the COVID relief bill that Congress passed in December included $638 million for low-income water and sewer bill assistance. Despite its high-falootin’ mouthful of a name, the Low-Income Household Drinking Water and Wastewater Emergency Assistance Program (LIHDWWEAP?*) has the feel of a last-minute provision tossed into the package. The $638M program got just 1.5 pages in Section 533 of the mammoth 5,593 page law, with little guidance on how the program will be structured or administered. Meanwhile, a new presidential administration has just taken office and is still trying to get organized. Advocates, regulators, and water sector managers are puzzled about how to manage the program and what it might mean for future federal forays into water affordability; I’ve been fielding lots of calls and messages on this issue over the past month.
Frequent readers also know that there are good reasons to be sober in our expectations of how much means-tested assistance can really help water affordability. But means-tested assistance is what Congress has cooking, and it's a useful part of an affordability strategy. So here I’ll do my best to summarize what we know about LIHDWWEAP (I’m going to call it LĬD-wēp , or LID-weep) administration and offer some ideas to the people charged with putting it into action.
LĬD-wēp
Section 533 doesn’t say much about how LIHDWWEAP is supposed to work, but here are the basics. The program is to be administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), not EPA. That’s important because HHS already runs LIHEAP, the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program; Congress probably figures water utilities are a lot like energy utilities.**
These folks don’t do much with water & sewer systems… yet
HHS will not administer LIHDWWEAP directly. Rather, the program is structured as a set of grants to state and tribal governments. HHS is supposed to allot grants to each state and tribe based on the size of their populations under 150% of federal poverty levels and the share of the population that spends more than 30% of monthly income on housing. HHS hasn’t yet set the allotment formula, and it’s going to take at least several months of rulemaking before a dime gets to the states.
In turn, state governments will send funds to water utilities. Each state will have its own method for allocating funds to utilities and rules for the use of those funds. Section 533 says only that LIHDWWEAP is supposed to reduce water bill debt or service rates for “low-income households, particularly those with the lowest incomes, that pay a high proportion of household income for drinking water and wastewater services.” The law does not define “low-income” or “high proportion.” Section 533 directs HHS to use existing administrative procedures to the extent possible, but ultimately it will be up to water and sewer utilities to get the LIHDWWEAP money to the people who need it.
Implementing LIHDWWEAP
Congress just told HHS, hundreds of state and tribal agencies, and tens of thousands of utilities to provide means-tested assistance for low-income water/sewer customers. To be blunt, nobody really knows how to do that. Many utilities currently provide means-tested assistance or rate reduction programs, but to my knowledge there has never been a systematic study of U.S. water assistance program design, implementation or impact.† We’re more or less flying blind here.
All I can say definitively about LIHDWWEAP implementation is:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Having said that, I’ve worked with lots of utilities, I've seen a lot of assistance programs, and I know some things about water rates and public management. So with all appropriate caveats, here are some thoughts on how to implement the version of LIHDWWEAP that Congress just created. In crafting these educated guesses, I assume that state agencies and utility managers want to help low-income people as quickly and effectively as possible, and that strategic positioning for future LIHDWWEAP is a secondary concern.
Counsel for state administrators
Once HHS determines your state’s LIHDWWEAP allotment:
- Use a simple formula to allocate funds. Don’t bother trying to gather data on arrears or water debt and run sophisticated analyses to see which utilities “need” the most funding. That will take time and require data that lots of utilities can’t get readily, and funding is pretty meager anyway (it works out to about $10 for every person in the U.S. with income under 150% of poverty) so complexity would just slow things down. Just distribute funds to utilities as a function of service population and poverty rate. Where water and sewer services are offered by different organizations, just split them in half. No need for fancy allocation methods.
- Build a two-tiered system. Your state has hundreds of water and sewer utilities. A few of them are large, serving tens of thousands to maybe more than a million people. Those big utilities are professionalized organizations with hundreds to thousands of employees. But most of your state’s water and sewer utilities are very small, serving populations of less than 10,000 and employing fewer than a dozen people—maybe just one or two part-timers. Set up separate LIHDWWEAP implementation processes for big and small systems. The right size cut-off will vary from state to state, but I’d suggest a threshold of something like 50,000 in service population.
- Give big systems funds and get out of the way. Those large utilities probably have pretty good billing and accounting systems to track water/sewer debt, and they have a good idea how many customers may need assistance—lots of big utilities already have means-tested assistance, debt forgiveness, or rates in place. Send these big utilities their share of the LIHDWWEAP funds and let them use existing programs or create locally-tailored systems to get funds to customers who need it. Ask for a simple one-page report at the end of the year to tell you how they spent the money and how much they have left.
- Set up third-party administration for small systems. Your state’s small utilities already have a lot on their plates. Many have antiquated billing systems—maybe even paper ledgers—and poor or hard-to-manage account records. Most won’t have the organizational bandwidth to do the accounting, auditing, and reporting for LIHDWWEAP, let alone the capacity to handle means-testing. Even moderately-sized utilities (serving say 25,000) will not want to invest in administration of a LIHDWWEAP program that isn’t very generous. Instead, allocate funds to small systems, and then set up boilerplate memoranda of understanding (MOUs) that pool the small systems’ funds into funds to be administered by regional or county-level social service agencies that already manage means-tested programs. Allow funds to be distributed to any income-qualified resident of the small systems’ service areas. Don’t bother tying back benefits to specific bills or water debts.
Counsel for utilities
Once your state administrator allocates your LIHDWWEAP funds, they will probably come with some rules. Everything that follows carries the caveat: “…if state and federal regulations allow.”
Paperwork a'comin! Let's try to keep it simple.
- Use existing programs. If you already have a means-tested assistance or discount program that seems to work, just funnel the LIHDWWEAP funds into it and expand outreach and eligibility as much possible. In many cases the new program won't give very much money. Many existing programs target specific segments of the population (e.g., elderly, disabled); these should be expanded to include any income-qualified customers.
- Focus on shut-offs. If you don’t already have a means-tested assistance/discount program or your program doesn’t work very well, use LIHDWWEAP funds to manage (preferably eliminate) shut-offs for nonpayment. Setting up, publicizing, and administering an effective assistance program takes a lot of time. To help people right away, stick the LIHDWWEAP money into a dedicated account. When a residential customer account falls into serious delinquency and is at risk of shutoff, contact the customer and ask if (s)he qualifies for assistance by whatever guidelines are adopted locally. Make that process as easy as possible. If a customer slated for shut-off qualifies, just use the LIHDWWEAP funds to pay off the debt and maintain service. You can do this literally up to the moment when the utility crew shows up to shut the water off (but preferably earlier). Once a permanent assistance/discount program is up and running, any remaining LIHDWWEAP funds can supplement it.
- Work together. All of this stuff is easier to manage in larger organizations. If your utility doesn’t have the organizational capacity to take on LIHDWWEAP administration, cooperate with other utilities and/or organizations in your area to save on administrative costs while helping your customers in need.
Portentous LIHDWWEAP
LIHDWWEAP might have been a congressional afterthought jammed into an overstuffed emergency relief package, but it portends more federal water assistance to come. LIHEAP-style assistance seems to be the congressional Democrats’ preferred instrument for addressing water affordability. Congress and HHS will be watching as states and utilities grope toward administrative processes. Next time Congress takes up LIHDWWEAP, they'll probably have more than 300 words to say about how to carry it out.
*Y’all Capitol Hill people really need to think through the acronymic implications of the names you stick on programs.
**They’re not, really.
†We badly need such a study, but serious evaluation (i.e., rigorous analysis, not cherry-picked case studies) won’t be easy or cheap. Got a couple hundred grand to sponsor such a study? HMU!
Thank you Manny for this post and your good work. There is great need for your rigor on this topic. There are lots of thorny issues as you know and we have discussed – ie:
– if it is a LIHEAP type plan then the money goes to the utility and the utility does not have any obligation to write off debt. The money just goes into the utility general fund and is applied to debts and probably much will be eaten up with administrative costs because administering to determine “need” is very difficult unless the law/state administrator gives the utility wide discretion to give/deny assistance – However – a LIHEAP type plan with Federal Funding is certainly a lot better than just having utilities adjust rates themselves based on need because that just results in less revenue for the utility and costly expense for administration – ask Phila WD about it. This just forces rates to go up for everybody.
– what about tenants who do not get the water bill but to whom the water bill is passed through in rent charges by their landlord? do they get help?
– what about multiple residents of the same property all on one water meter? Whose income/need do you look at? Just the owner of the property?
– what about shut offs – going the top of the list for help seems common sense but is it actually fair to those who struggle and yet pay? – Wouldn’t it be better to just ban shut offs entirely and say that accumulated unpaid water bills get a first lien on the property if it is ever sold? Water is different than electricity isn’t it?
All the best to you in your new home and hope we can catch up soon! Bill
Thanks, Bill.
No question that means-tested assistance is a band-aid approach to water/sewer affordability. That’s not to say means-tested programs are useless (band-aids are great when you have a small cut!), but they should be the last thing we do for affordability, not the first. Congress is apparently focused on the LIHEAP model, and so LIHDWWEAP is what we’ve got. The point of this post was to offer thoughts on how to cope *immediately* administratively with the undercooked dish that Congress just served up in Section 533.
For all of the reasons you raise and more, we need comprehensive a affordability *strategy* in which means-tested assistance would be the last thing we do, mainly to help folks in short-term situations. We cannot have significant shares of our population perennially dependent on means-tested water/sewer affordability programs. We can do better.
I’m thinking hard about what such a strategy would look like. Look forward to discussing further!