City officials are pointing to several programs aimed at defraying the cost of paying for basic utilities, which are set to go up next year.
The CAReS, orCity Assistance and Rebate System, has been especially effective in helping people deal with a number of residential expenses, say city officials.
“It offers financial assistance and rebates for a number of resident expenses and is designed to help people before they get into financial trouble,” said Becky Doyle, assistant director of business services for Longmont’s public works and resource department.
Among the services targeted under CAReS include housing rehabilitation, down payment assistance, NextLight Discounted Internet Service, city property tax/rent, electricity and water payments, according to a staff report to the city council.
The city council last week voted initially to raise basic monthly residential rates by 2.5% in 2022 and another 2.5% in 2023. The city council in December 2019, approved increases in water and electricity rates, effective in January 2020, to largely pay the cost of expanding the capacity of the city’s Nelson-Flanders Water Treatment Plant.
A public hearing is scheduled on the proposed electric rate hikes and a final council vote on Oct. 26. Hikes in storm drainage utility rates are also expected to go up, with the council scheduled to consider those increases on Oct. 12, with a public hearing set for Oct. 26.
CAReS has grown substantially since it began in March 2019. For 2019, CAReS helped 184 residents out of 1,800 eligible households with average rebates of $287. The total rebate amount doled out that year was $52,881, according to the staff report.
In 2020, there were 711 participants who received an average rebate of $387 with a total rebate amount of $275,415 for the year, the report states.
Work done with Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative and its Behavioral Insights Teams, or BIT, boosted enrollment in 2020, the staff report states.
BIT helped the city design an intervention to increase the applications to CAReS, as well as a randomized controlled trial to test the effectiveness of the intervention.
In August 2020, utility customers who received a utility bill in the mail were separated into three trial groups — a control group who received no application reminder, a group who received a flier that used behavioral science insights to spur recipients to apply and a group that received both the flier and a copy of the CAReS application, the report states.
Before the state of the intervention, CAReS received 252 eligible applications — already greater than the number of participants in the previous year. During the trial period, another 227 applications were received, with a statistically significant difference shown between the control and treatment groups. The balance of the applications were received after the trial period of October through December, according to the staff report.
The city is likely to continue adding annual reminders of the CAReS program in utility bills in the future, the staff report states.
Residents can receive help from CAReS if they quality for LEAP (Colorado Low Income Energy Assistance Program) , SNAP (food assistance), Medicaid-MSP or SLMB (Specified Low-Income Medicare Beneficiary), 104PTC (Property Tax/Rent/Heat Credit), WIC (Nutrition Program) and USDA free lunch.
