5. Emergency Fund

Our regulated energy utilities have a unique opportunity to leverage available funds under the federal government's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to provide critical payment assistance to eligible low-income customers. Under ARRA, funds were appropriated for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Contingency Fund (Emergency Fund) over fiscal years 2009 and 2010. This Emergency Fund is in addition to the regular TANF Contingency Fund that needy families in California can access through established agencies during the economic downturn. Through this provision of ARRA, every one dollar of local contributions will be matched with four dollars from the Emergency Fund. Through this one time program that will expire on September 30, 2010, eligible low-income customers who have experienced an uncontrollable or unforeseen hardship may receive an energy credit on their utility bill.

To take advantage of this unique and fleeting opportunity, we direct respondent investor-owned utilities (IOUs) to file Tier 3 advice letters within 30 days of the effective date of this order outlining their proposed program to take advantage of the Emergency Fund. We envision that respondent IOUs will continue to use their shareholder and employee funded charitable contribution for this purpose, but may also present a proposal to transfer some funds collected in the CARE balancing account for this effort to leverage as much available ARRA funds as possible. We also expect that IOUs will keep administrative costs to a minimum in order to provide the greatest benefit to needy utility customers. And any unspent ratepayer amounts would be returned to the CARE balancing account.

This is not to be read as preapproval of the concept to transfer CARE dollars for this effort, but the Commission would like to consider this idea on an expedited basis in the advice letter process, so as to take full advantage of the limited time to access federal funding and to leverage as much money as possible to help needy families in California.

This advice letter filing should be utilized by all natural gas and electric utilities under the jurisdiction of this Commission, and not just by the respondents to this Rulemaking. The Commission's Executive Director will serve this OIR on all jurisdictional gas and electric utilities.