Despite warmer than normal weather over the past several weeks, a record number of Flathead Electric Cooperative members have had their power turned off this winter because they couldn’t pay the bill.

In January and February, 256 disconnects were made. It’s a record-setting pace, considering there were 639 disconnects in all of 2009 and 543 disconnects in 2008, said Tod Young, director of finance and accounting for the co-op.

Disconnects account for a little more than 1 percent of Flathead Electric’s 47,794 members. Even so, the cooperative’s collections department recently noted the upswing in disconnects in its newsletter, saying the trend is an “unmistakable symptom of the recession.”

Particularly noticeable this heating season are area residents who have in the past enjoyed steady incomes, but because of job losses are struggling for the first time.

“These are folks who’ve had no experience with not paying their bills,” a collections supervisor noted in the newsletter. “So now they don’t know what to do or where to begin and we truly empathize with their situation.”

There’s a public perception that the cooperative is restrained from disconnecting power during the winter heating season, from Oct. 1 through April 30, but that’s not true, Young said. Flathead Electric is not regulated by the state Public Service Commission and therefore doesn’t have to adhere to its criteria.

“As a matter of policy, though, when the temperature is forecast to be below 15 degrees, we do not disconnect,” Young said.

Flathead Electric will make every attempt to work with its members, which makes communication a vital two-way street, he said. By the time a member is actually disconnected, there have been several attempts to contact them and work out payment arrangements.

The process goes like this: First a bill is mailed. If there is no response within a reasonable period of time, a second “past due” notice is sent. Then the co-op makes a courtesy call by phone. If there’s still no reply, a disconnect notice is sent. If all that doesn’t prompt a member to contact the co-op, a meter-services employee is sent to the home to knock on the door “in a last-ditch effort” to make arrangements.

But if all that fails, Flathead Electric does physically disconnect service or remove a member’s meter.

The co-op changed the process last fall to save members the $30 fee charged to leave a cut-off notice in the form of a pink tag on a member’s door. Instead, those last notices are now mailed, so it behooves members to check their mailboxes and phone messages.

“It’s so important they communicate with us,” Young stressed.

NorthWestern Energy, which supplies natural gas to the Flathead Valley, doesn’t release public information about the numbers of its disconnects, but is seeing a rate of shut-offs that is comparable to last year, director of communications Claudia Rapkoch said.

The Montana Public Service Commission, which tracks Northwestern’s disconnects, recorded 9,399 requests for termination for the 2008-2009 heating season, with 1,867 actual terminations within its statewide base of 364,740 customers, according to Phillip Cooke, chief of the PSC compliance bureau. The commission doesn’t have statistics broken down by county, he said.

Results of the 2009-2010 heating season won’t be compiled until late April.

During the 2006-2007 heating season, when Montana’s economy was still fairly robust, NorthWestern had 7,078 termination requests, with 1,562 terminations among its 366,556 customers. The following year, when the economy started to cool, the number of termination requests rose to 10,270, with 2,364 terminations.

Like the electric cooperative, NorthWestern Energy follows a very specific process to notify customers of a service disconnect, with extra notification during the heating season. Rapkoch, too, said it’s a “common misconception that power can’t be shut off in the winter.” The company does give special dispensation to customers who are receiving federal assistance, are elderly or have certain medical conditions. Those at-risk customers must be in contact with the company though, she said.

“It’s expensive for a utility to disconnect service,” Rapkoch said. “We’d much rather work with the customer and point them in the direction of assistance programs. The vast majority of customers want to do the right thing.”

The uptick in the number of distressed households during this heating season has sent a record number of people to the Community Action Partnership of Northwest Montana (formerly Northwest Montana Human Resources) for financial help with their power bills.

Since Oct. 1, 2009, the agency has issued more than $2.4 million in Low-Income Energy Assistance Program benefits to residents in the area it serves — Flathead, Lincoln, Lake and Sanders counties. That program specifically assists households in paying for the high cost of winter home heating, no matter what the heating source.

About 5,000 applications for energy assistance have been processed during this heating season, up 29 percent over a year ago. And two years ago, the Community Action Partnership saw a 28 percent increase in requests for energy assistance, Energy Programs Manager Kimberly Dewitt said.

It’s difficult to estimate the average amount of financial assistance given per household, since the agency uses an 11-tier income chart that’s combined with the size and type of home, and the kind of heating source used.

“We’ve not run out of money,” she said. “Occasionally the state has infused money if the federal appropriation runs short.”

Each year the federal government gives Montana an appropriation based on a state work plan that estimates the number of households that probably will need help with power bills. There’s also an energy contingency fund of federal money set aside as a backup.

“This year because of the high case load we’ve used the contingency fund,” Dewitt said. “[But] we do have adequate funding to help new applicants through the end of April.”

The agency offers a number of programs beyond energy assistance, such as weatherization assistance and emergency heating-system repair or replacement.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com