Stimulus creates local jobs weatherizing homes

Philip Pennyman warmed his wife and three children with logs in the fireplace last winter because he couldn’t afford to use the furnace.

Rob Brondell burned through his retirement savings because he’d lost his job.

Enlarge this image

Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com

Bird-Family Insulation employee Tim Allgood applies caulk to a window frame at the Lithonia home of Philip and Deborah Pennyman. A Clarkston-based community action agency helped make it happen.

More home weatherizing photos

Recent headlines:

• Georgia State gets grant to study school bullying 
• Delta flight to Atlanta diverted to Chattanooga 
• State Masonic group withdraws charges 

   • Metro and state news

Their lives intersected in a beneficial way through the federal stimulus plan. Brondell found work weatherizing homes — including Pennyman’s — while Pennyman qualified for the government-funded improvements. He said he can’t hold a job because of an incident that left him wheelchair-bound three years ago, and said he stopped using heat after his electric and gas bills reached $700 one month.

“They said I was losing a lot of energy,” Pennyman said, as he watched a half dozen workmen scurry about his ranch-style house in south DeKalb County on Wednesday. He used to be able to poke a finger between the outside door to his master bedroom and its frame, but now it was sealed tight against the wind.

Pennyman and Brondell are benefitting from $8 million in grants that the Clarkston-based Partnership for Community Action is expecting from Washington over the next three years. Agency president Mohammad Saleem said the stimulus should allow him to increase the number of houses he weatherizes in DeKalb and three nearby counties from about 240 a year to nearly 700.

The federal stimulus is designed to create jobs and reduce the nation’s energy dependence.

“There is a high demand,” Saleem said of the weatherization work. “We could never do enough, so this stimulus will definitely help.”

Saleem’s outfit is one of nearly two dozen in Georgia created in the 1960s to channel federal poverty relief funds. Similar groups across the country are now hoping to receive more money to weatherize homes.

Stimulus legislation increased the income threshold for the free weatherization service to twice the poverty level, up from 125 percent of it. A family of four must make less than $44,100 to qualify for aid of up to about $6,000.

The Fulton Atlanta Community Action Authority is also hoping to get some of the federal dollars, said the group’s president and chief executive, Joyce J. Dorsey. She said home weatherization is a good use of taxpayer money because it will reduce dependency on utility bill subsidies, which her group offers to needy households.

“They won’t come to us every year for help,” she said.

If Dorsey’s group gets money, it’ll become a new player in the weatherization field. Saleem’s organization, which gets regular federal funding, is spending its annual weatherization budget at a faster pace, anticipating the boost in government spending, said Paul Najjar, who runs Saleem’s weatherization program.

That has allowed Saleem’s three contractors to expand their work crews, satisfying one goal of the stimulus legislation: job creation.

Bob Bird, owner of Bird Family Insulation, said he has hired four men and hopes to hire three more workers.

“We’ve definitely ramped up to be able to respond to the production goals that Mr. Najjar has set,” Bird said.

A six-man crew was patching, sawing, screwing and hammering at Pennyman’s house. Three of them were new hires, including Brondell, whom Bird took on last month.

Brondell, 63, was wearing knee pads and kneeling in front of a duct ventilation grate, squeezing caulk around the edges to seal out a draft. He said he was laid off from a construction management job in July and had spent much of his retirement savings paying the mortgage and bills. “The builders weren’t selling houses,” he said.

He hopes to get back into management someday, but in the meantime he’s happy to be at work.

When asked for his thoughts on the federal stimulus package, Brondell said “there’s good and bad parts to it.” He quickly added that the weatherization funding was among the good parts.

“Not only am I getting employed — and other people,” he said, “but we’re able to help people get things insulated, and conserve.”