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County run program designed for assisting Efland sewer customers would have to be opened up to <br />assisting any qualifying County citizen with their sewer bills. <br />Recommendations <br />None of these programs are designed to provide ongoing assistance to customers. The existing <br />programs are designed for customers who have temporary or occasional circumstances that make it <br />difficult to pay their utility bills. The Rogers Road grant program was designed to help citizens with a <br />large one-time expense, so would not be applicable to long-term aid. In addition, none of these <br />programs has a mechanism to decide how much aid is needed in each circumstance, other than a cap on <br />the dollar amount available. However, DSS Emergency Assistance is currently available to the Efland <br />customers. Samaritan Relief would be available as well if money either from Hillsborough's earmarked <br />funds or Orange County's General Fund was made available to OCIM to distribute to Efland sewer <br />customers. <br />If the BOCC wished to create a program that would provide ongoing assistance to needy families, staff <br />suggests the following basic framework for such a program. Customers who are in need would contact <br />DSS or would be referred to DSS by the Orange-Alamance Water administrative staff (who do the <br />billing for the system) or by Engineering staff. Customers who qualify for the DSS EA program <br />mentioned above and who were existing Efland Sewer customers could take a letter of qualification or <br />some other written qualification notice to the offices of Orange-Alamance. Orange-Alamance would <br />adjust that household sewer bill by eliminating the base charge portion of the bill. The adjustment <br />would continue to be in effect every month until June 30. Every year on June 30 all adjustments would <br />be removed and customers would need to re-qualify to be eligible for the adjustment. So, for example, <br />if the proposed rate schedule is adopted the base charge for all customers after the first rate increase <br />would be $12.96. A family whose water use is typically 4000 gallons per month would ordinarily have <br />a bill of $57.96, but if they qualified for assistance their bill would be reduced to $45.00 ($57.96 - <br />$12.96). For reference, the current bill for 4000 gallons per month is $19.70. <br />The advantages to this type of assistance are three-fold. The program would provide a monthly benefit <br />to customers that is relatively easy for Orange-Alamance to administer. The qualification process and <br />criteria are already in place, since they would be the same as the existing Emergency Assistance <br />program already being run through DSS. Finally, use of this program still allows customers to receive <br />benefits from both the Emergency Assistance program and Samaritan Relief for either supplemental <br />assistance with their sewer bill or for assistance with other bills. <br />If any additional information is needed, please advise. <br />