August 7, 2020

On Thursday July 30th - two days before Governor Inslee’s moratorium on utility shut-offs was due to expire - Puget Sound Sage and Sierra Club took to Olympia to demand that the Governor keep households connected to basic utilities during the pandemic by extending the moratorium on utility shut-offs. The moratorium prohibits the disconnection of energy, water, and telecommunications utilities from Washington households due to non-payment.

Even before this pandemic struck, an estimated 15 million people in this country - especially low-income people and people of color - had difficulty affording utility services. 1 in 5 US households report reducing or forgoing necessities such as food and medicine to pay an energy bill. Prior to the pandemic, we found that when households in the South King County region were hit with a utility bill $50 higher than normal, they cut basic necessities like heating and cooling, rent/mortgage payments, food, medicine, and childcare/eldercare. Nationwide, utility bills are one of the top reasons that people take out predatory payday loans. Meanwhile, utility CEOs took home $1 billion between 2017 and 2019 and delivered hundreds of millions of dollars of profit to investors.

The day before the moratorium was set to expire on August 1st, Governor Inslee signed a proclamation to extend it until October 15.

For now, households won’t need to worry about making the impossible decision on whether to put food on the table or keep the lights on and the water running. But as the pandemic continues to surge around the country and the debt on utilities piles up, long term action needs to be taken to protect the communities that are already being disproportionately harmed by the crisis, as the economic fallout from COVID-19 is likely to last years.