DEL.ICIO.US‘New faces’ struggle to pay utilities
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, November 03, 2008
Where the living room meets the hallway of Vanessa Vargas’ home in College Park sits a pink plastic bucket. The bucket seems situated to catch a leak but it’s really a relic of the family’s ordeal: 22 days without water last month.
Family members and neighbors used the bucket to carry 5 gallons of water so that Vanessa, 31, and her children, Darius, 14, and Taina, 2, could bathe and wash dishes.
CURTIS COMPTON / ccompton@ajc.com
Shay George, 47, performs her daily job search with her laptop and wireless card on the living room sofa at her College Park home she shares with a roommate.
Vanessa has needed help before — with food stamps and Medicaid for her son, who has club feet and a cleft lip and palate — but never for utilities. But this fall she faced staggering water bills caused by leaks in pipes at the rental house, an ongoing struggle to find work and rising prices for food. For the first time, she registered for welfare.
“I always found a way,” said Vargas, who has bachelor’s and associate’s degrees and has sold Avon products. “It just all of a sudden got hard.”
More utility disconnects
In an economy that has Americans scrambling to make ends meet, more people are putting off utility payments — usually considered a necessity. Many of those grappling to keep the lights and water working are members of the working class who’ve never had to ask for financial help before — or not to this extent.
“We’re talking about newly poor, the new faces of poverty,” said Yvonne Thomas, vice president of programs for the Fulton Atlanta Community Action Authority, which dispenses federal aid for heating starting in November. The group has already seen a 40 to 50 percent increase in the number of people calling for help since this time last year.
“These are people that have never asked for assistance before,” she said, referring to a third of her callers. But with “downsizing and all that, they find themselves in a situation they thought they never would be in.”
Georgia Power reports 12,000 more disconnects in the third quarter of this year compared with the same period last year, spokesman Jeff Wilson said. However, he attributed much of the difference to several days in August of 2007 when the high heat index barred disconnects. Still, overdue payments increased 9 percent during those time periods.
The problem is felt across metro Atlanta, according to officials at helping agencies and utilities.
• Project SHARE, a program of The Salvation Army that helps people pay their Georgia Power bills, saw incoming calls at its Fulton-DeKalb location grow from about 3,850 in August to 5,212 in September.
• Coweta-Fayette EMC, a gas and electric company that serves several Southside counties, reports a 20 percent hike in the number of people making payment arrangements since last year.
• In Cobb County, the number of calls related to requests for financial help with water bills jumped from 5 to 15 percent in August.
“It’s that terrible crunch,” said Edward Powers, executive director of Travelers Aid of Metro Atlanta. “Do you buy the medicine, or do you buy the food? What are your choices? And obviously people have been buying gasoline, buying other things and now it’s time to pay the oil companies, pay the gas companies and there isn’t that much left over.”
‘You have to consider survival’
Shay George, 47, of College Park recently sought public assistance for the first time.
George held a regular job for years but saw her salary at a Christian broadcasting company whittled away from $30,000 to “really a fraction of that” as the company lost financial ground. She tried her luck with temporary employment agencies, but has only found two weeks of work in three months of looking. When she got two months behind in her rent and utilities, she reached out for help.
“You’re dealing with pride, but by the same token, you have to consider survival,” she said.
When she filed for food stamps, she received a list of agencies that could offer public assistance. Ultimately, George received some help from The Sullivan Center and also from her brother.
“When you get to a point that you recognize a lot of things are not what you assumed it would be,” then you “do what it takes to get you through,” she said.
Bessie Christmas, 48, brings in $1,900 each month from driving and instructing special-needs adults and caring for a few elderly clients. Until she totaled her car and injured her arm in a wreck last summer, she was squeaking by.
“Everything was paid, but I was broke,” she said.
Payments for a new car, which she needed for her job, along with the rising price of everything, left her without money for utilities. She finally got help from Project Take Charge, a homelessness prevention program of Decatur Cooperative Ministry. The group plans to pay off Christmas’ water and power bills of more than $1,000, said program manager Cliff Richards.
Christmas worries whether others may need help more than she does. Then she reminds herself: “Everybody gets down.”
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