Belmont Citizen-Herald — November 14, 2019
While the notion that “if you build it, they will come” may apply to fantasy baseball parks, it does not apply to Belmont’s programs offering financial assistance to lower income residents. As the town moves toward an expected operating override in the next year for property taxes, now is the time to ensure that residents can access those programs that would ease the financial burden of supporting the operations of our community.
Three primary Belmont programs exist, eligibility for which should be tied together. Under a Belmont Light program, low-income customers have their monthly fixed “customer charge” set to $0. In addition, their total energy charge is discounted by nearly 30%. The total savings for a typical customer is $485 per year. Under the Belmont Water program, eligible customers receive a discount of 30% off both their water and sewer bills. For a typical Belmont residential customer, who uses 3,000 cubic feet (30 hundred cubic feet) per quarter, the discount offers a bill reduction of roughly $240 on the water bill and $460 on the sewer bill. Between our two municipal utilities, in other words, income-eligible customers can pocket bill reductions of nearly $1,200 a year. Add Belmont’s property tax deferral program to these utility discounts, and it cannot be disputed that the town devotes a fair amount of effort to helping our lower income residents.
However, a problem exists. Despite the fact that each of these programs is offered by a municipal office (Belmont Light, Belmont Water, Belmont Tax Assessor), residents who need these programs must submit three different applications to three different offices in order to access the programs. That makes no sense. In particular, the issue of whether Belmont should offer a unified system of financial assistance to its lower income residents will soon gain a hearing before the town’s Water Advisory Board. That Advisory Board should approve the proposal that is being advanced.
If Belmont’s programs now have different eligibility requirements, surely Belmont officials should be able to work together so that all town programs are seeking to reach the same populations. It might be understandable if two private utilities could not agree on which “low-income” populations to serve through their discounts. It would be inexcusable if two of Belmont’s municipal offices could not reach such an agreement.
Considerable work has been performed in recent years to identify enrollment barriers to a whole host of public assistance programs, including federal fuel assistance (known as LIHEAP), Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare, Food Stamps, and other similar programs. Barriers that have been identified include: (1) lack of information about the program’s existence and benefits; (2) lack of information, or erroneous information, about a household’s eligibility; (3) complicated enrollment processes, including income verification; (4) enrollment processes and locations that are inconvenient in time and/or location; (5) the social “stigma” that accompanies a view of benefits as “welfare”; and (6) the confusion inherent in the need to access different benefits through different offices, filling out different forms, and meeting different eligibility requirements. Belmont would be well-served to take notice of these barriers and to seek to overcome them in its outreach and enrollment processes.
Each of these barriers can be addressed by allowing a resident to visit a town office –be it Belmont Light, Belmont Water, the Tax Assessor, the Council on Aging, or some other office—and filling out a single form to apply for all three programs in one sitting. No new program is created. Existing programs are simply made more accessible. If someone qualifies for the Belmont Light discount, why should they not also qualify for the Belmont Water discount?
Before Belmont heads into discussions about who can, and who cannot, afford an operating override to support fundamental municipal services such as educating our kids and paving our streets, the town should make those decisions to ensure that the financial assistance that is offered to residents in need is available in practice, not merely on paper. In light of the foreseeable need for increased property taxes through an override in the near future, creating a unified system of eligibility and intake for Belmont’s electricity, water/sewer and property tax programs is not only good politics, but is good public policy as well.
Community Conversations - Belmont MA 