Posted by Scott D. Yost | Aug 18, 2022 | News

Everyone knows that the Guilford County Division of Social Services helps county residents get food and electricity when they can’t afford it, but another less well-known program helps those who can’t pay their water bills.

On Thursday, Aug. 18, the Guilford County Board of Commissioners is scheduled to vote to accept $831,312 in new funds for county social services workers to use as part of the county’s Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program.

The money is provided by the NC Department of Health and Human Services and will be used to continue the program in Guilford County through the end of June of 2023.

According to information provided to the Board of Commissioners for the August 18 meeting regarding the water-bill relief program, it “provides emergency assistance to low-income households, particularly those with the lowest of incomes that pay a high proportion of their household income for drinking and wastewater services.”

Eligibility for the help is income-based – and households currently receiving benefits through Low-Income Energy Assistance Programs, Food and Nutrition Services, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, are automatically eligible.

Funds from the program have to be paid to operators of public water systems or water treatment services to reduce the bills of eligible households.

After the first allocation of money was received by Guilford County last fall, state officials implemented a way to cut back on paperwork for the individual counties participating in the program.  They put in place a statewide web portal that let water providers to complete vendor agreements.  Therefore, individual county-level agreements don’t need to be completed or updated for this new allocation period.

Hope it will be properly used and not wasted.

This seems like such waste of costs on administration to determine who is and isn’t eligible and then to get them the funds they need for water. Just more government waste. They should instead provide basic residential water services at no cost and thus no administrative burden. https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/water-for-all/

Sounds good to me. I’ll just run my sprinklers 24/7 and have the greenest lawn in town.

Hear, hear! The state has no right to extort the citizens for an essential (and free) commodity. My last GSO Water/Sewer bill was $84 – for ONE month, in 2004. Now I have a well, which has cost me zero, and a septic tank that has been pumped twice ($350 total). So I would be $20,000 poorer (at least) if I were still a victim of our “public servants” and their little shakedown. They’re worse than The Mob.

Great example! Just think, if you’d invested the cash monthly in an index fund, what you would have now is a LOT.

Just use the $831,000 to reduce the water bill rates.

If the Mafia got itself a monopoly over an essential commodity for living, forced everyone to fork over money to them every month/quarter, and then jacked up the cost above inflation every single year, causing real problems and distress for working families, there would be universal outrage. This is how your government behaves.

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