Kennekca Kindell remembers the winter of 2017 too well. The gas in her Pawtucket apartment had been shut off that spring by Rhode Island’s biggest utility, National Grid.
That meant no heat and no gas stove. For nine months, she relied on an electric hot plate to cook meals for her five kids.
“And I used to heat up the water like that so I can put my children in the tub,” Kindell said.
Kindell tells me her story at her job — a Dunkin’ Donuts in Pawtucket. Here, she makes $10.25 an hour, which barely helps pay her $200-a-month gas bill, plus the hundreds of dollars she still owes National Grid.
“I just felt like I wasn’t a good enough parent because my gas was off, and it’s like, I have to provide for (my kids) and I felt like I couldn’t provide them.”
After her gas was shut off last year, Kindell said the company wanted about $500 to turn it back on. Kindell didn’t have federal heating assistance at the time, so she had to wait for her tax returns before she could afford to pay her bill.
She said that was a very depressing time.
“I just felt like I wasn’t a good enough parent because my gas was off, and it’s like, I have to provide for (my kids) and I felt like I couldn’t provide them,” Kindell said.
So far this year, more than 5,600 National Grid gas customers, and more than 12,000 electricity customers in Rhode Island have been shut off. (However, most people get their power back within days, according to National Grid).
Kimberly Frodelius, a compliance manager from National Grid’s credits and collections unit, said a customer’s power is not shut off immediately after they miss a payment.
“We take a lot of measures to try and reach out to those customers and make sure that they know that they have options, they have payment plan options, they have assistance program options because service termination is always a last resort for us,” Frodelius said.
Frodelius said customers have almost two months to pay their bill after it’s been issued before their power is shut off. Throughout those two months, she said, National Grid will call customers and send out power termination warnings in the mail.
However, a welfare rights organization called the George Wiley Center said National Grid doesn’t always comply with Rhode Island’s shut off laws.
The center sued National Grid in 2015 for terminating the utilities of thousands of people who have serious medical problems.
“People are being harmed, families are being torn apart because they can’t afford their utilities.”
Since then, a few thousand people have gotten their power back and are protected from being shut off again, but the George Wiley Center is still in negotiations with the Rhode Island Division of Public Utilities and Carriers (the division, along with the state Public Utilities Commission, regulates National Grid) to get even stronger protections on the books for seriously ill customers.
National Grid declined to comment on the lawsuit.
“People are being harmed, families are being torn apart because they can’t afford their utilities,” Camilo Viveiros, coordinator of the George Wiley Center, said. “We have people every week coming in (to the center) living in their car because they can’t afford utilities even with all the programs that we’ve helped win.”
One being the Arrears Management Program or AMP.
AMP is a program for lower-income residents who owe National Grid money. If the customer pays their utility bills on time for a year, then up to $1,500 of their debt is forgiven.
However, Kindell said the AMP program isn’t generous enough.
She enrolled in AMP after her gas was shut off last year, but she has since defaulted because National Grid requires customers on the program to pay a monthly rate that’s an average of their bills throughout the year, a rate that Kindell said is still unaffordable.
“That’s what I was trying to explain to them, if I had it I would pay it, I don’t have it. I can do $25 maybe even $30 a month, but they don’t understand that,” Kindell said.
The George Wiley Center believes a percentage of income payment plan or PIPP is the solution. Under PIPP, lower-income families pay a percentage of their annual income for their utilities each month.
Rhode Island actually offered PIPP back in the late 80s and early 90s in certain parts of the state, but the program was cut when federal funding ran out.
Viveiros said PIPP worked well for people who couldn’t afford their gas and electricity.
“There’s really no policy reason why it shouldn’t be brought back,” Viveiros said.
However, the Rhode Island Division of Public Utilities and Carriers does see one policy challenge.
“The more (energy) that we consume the more it costs for everyone.”
Administrator Macky McCleary said PIPP hides the ratepayers’ “consumption signal,” which shows how much energy a customer uses each month.
“The more (energy) that we consume the more it costs for everyone, and so it’s important for all the members of the society that are part of that social contract to be aware of the value of that to reduce their consumption as much as possible to only the amount that’s necessary,” McCleary said.
National Grid said it would be tough to afford the extra staff that would be needed to work with the thousands of customers that would be eligible for PIPP.
Utility customers that are struggling financially, whether they’re unemployed, elderly or handicapped, aren’t completely on their own.
National Grid offers protected status for them, which means they’re eligible for up to 30 percent off their bills and can’t have their services shut off during the wintertime.
The company also has “consumer advocates” that go out into the community, including to the George Wiley Center, to help lower-income customers enroll in those discounts and other payment plans.
Back at Dunkin’ Donuts in Pawtucket, Kinnecka Kindell tells me she used to work at a Dunkin’s in Boston before moving to Rhode Island.
She made more money there and didn’t struggle paying for utilities because heat was included in her rent. She also received funds from a program aimed at preventing families from becoming homeless.
Kindell doesn’t have that funding anymore and she’s trying to figure out ways to budget even tighter.
“But at the same time I have children and they have needs also, so it’s really hard. So I’m trying to just learn how to budget more and get us all on the same page because I don’t know what else to do,” Kindell said.
At least for the next year and half, her power can’t be shut off because she has a 5-month-old baby, and it’s illegal for National Grid to terminate power in any household where there’s a child under the age of two.