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New Yorkers Pay More to Keep Their Homes Warm

January 11, 2008

New York residents are being hit with an unusual combination this week: unseasonably warm weather and maddeningly large heating bills.

After receiving a bill for nearly $1,200 on Monday, Maxine Simpson turned off her hot-water heater to conserve oil. Ms. Simpson said that she had been taking just 100 gallons at a time from her dealer — enough to heat her three-family house in Brooklyn for about three weeks — but that those deliveries were costing more than $330 each.

“It’s hard to just cut back. I’m doing the very best that I can,” said Ms. Simpson, 74, who said that on warm days she ran her water heater for just one hour each morning and one hour each evening.

Despite a relatively mild winter so far, New Yorkers are paying more than ever to heat their homes, largely because of a surge in the prices of oil and natural gas. At an average price of $3.50 a gallon statewide, the price of heating oil has risen by more than one-third in the past year.

Already, 658,000 low-income households in the state have received federal assistance to help cover their heating costs this winter, said David A. Hansell, commissioner of the State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. That number is down slightly from a year ago, but because of prices, the amount of assistance handed out is higher this year, he said.

Mr. Hansell said state officials had prepared for a significant rise in oil prices, but even a conservative approach had underestimated the surge.

Mr. Hansell’s office, which administers the state’s allocation of federal heating assistance, raised the maximum benefit a New York household could receive to $540 this winter from $440 last year. But that increase, of nearly one-fourth, will buy less than 30 gallons of additional heating oil in New York City, where the average price exceeds $3.50 a gallon. Assuming that each household uses about 800 gallons of oil, Mr. Hansell estimated that the typical homeowner could spend $2,400 on fuel this winter, up from about $2,100 last year.

Federal officials are unlikely to employ emergency measures, like releasing petroleum or heating oil from strategic reserves, because the rise in oil prices was not caused by a disruption of supply or unusually high demand, state officials and oil industry executives said.

“Right now we don’t have a supply and demand issue,” said John Maniscalco, executive vice president of the New York Heating Oil Association, a group representing fuel dealers and related businesses. “We’ve barely even had a winter.”

Mr. Maniscalco said the high prices — crude oil has been trading for more than $95 a barrel after briefly cracking the $100 level for the first time last week — were due to “runaway” speculation by commodities traders. His group has been lobbying Congress to tighten the rules on commodities trading to reduce the effect of speculation.

With the price of oil so high, many aid recipients have already used up their federal allotments for this winter, state and local officials said. This has spurred Gov. Eliot Spitzer and several legislators, including Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, to call on President Bush to release $586 million in contingency funds that would supplement the federal assistance. A spokesman for Mr. Schumer said on Wednesday that the senator had received no response to his appeal to the president, made two months ago.

The contingency funds are intended to help victims of heat waves as well as cold spells, so the president often does not release them until the end of the summer.

“New Yorkers are in for real sticker shock when they get their home heating bills this month,” Mr. Schumer said. “High home heating prices particularly hurt senior citizens who are on a fixed income and are forced to make tough choices when the prices spike.”

Ruby Lindsey Roberts recalls paying just 16 cents a gallon for the oil that heated her house in Crown Heights in 1956. Half a century later, Ms. Roberts said she feared that she would not be able to afford any more oil.

“I’m about three days from freezing,” said Ms. Roberts, who estimated her age at 86. “Thank God for these hot days.”

Via the NYTimes Read the full story here

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Written by NY Politics · Filed Under News 

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