Aroostook Community Matters: ACAP’s Home Energy Assistance program – WAGM

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) – Applications for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance program are now available. On this week’s Community Matters Isaac Potter finds out more about the program.

The Home Energy Assistance Program is a low income, supplementary program to help people who qualify for the income guidelines to lower their expenses for heating during the winter season. Josh McAtee, the Heat manager at ACAP, says there are three things that you need to qualify for the program.

Josh McAtee, Heat Manager at ACAP, says “The Three things you need to qualify for this program is you need a permanently installed heating system, and you need to have that working. Then you need to fall under the income guidelines, which you find on ACAP’s webpage or MaineHousing’s web page, or you can just give us a call here at the heat hotline, and we will set you up for an interview. We are booking currently about six weeks out, which is much better than last year where we were booking 2-3 months out. So we really have buckled down here at ACAP to try and make it more accessible to more people earlier in the heating season so people aren’t freezing.”

McAtee says the process to apply for assistance is pretty simple.

Josh McAtee: “So we actually do the application for you, we just ask you the questions. We do it either over the phone or in person. We also do in home appointments, if someone is not able to make it physically into the office or do over the phone. We also have doubled our staff this year to allow us to twice as many applications. So far we have helped 3,066 families applied for heating assistance, and that is more than twice as many as last year.”

Many of the people who have received assistance say it is a huge relief for them.

Josh McAtee: “So thankful for this help, it was really needed. Last year we were fortunate enough that we got some additional funding to be able to give out two benefits, and that was the first time that had really happened. We don’t foresee that coming in the future, so we are going to have to adjust that additional amount of cost for heat, because it has almost doubled last year. Things haven’t gone down as of right now, so we are going to try and make the best of the dollars that we do have.”

Funds for the program will not be available until November,

For information about the program reach out to ACAP. Isaac Potter, News Source 8

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Original Source: https://www.wagmtv.com/2022/10/16/aroostook-community-matters-acaps-home-energy-assistance-program/