EBENSBURG — Cambria County’s weatherization assistance program will be getting a big boost through federal stimulus funds to make hundreds of homes more energy efficient.
The county will receive $4.1 million to weatherize up to 600 homes through March 2012, Deb Zimmerman, executive director of Community Action Program of Cambria County, confirmed Thursday.
The money is part of the $252 million Pennsylvania is receiving through the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act.
The stimulus money is designed to help create jobs.
The weatherization program helps low-income residents reduce their energy consumption and costs through such things as installing insulation, updating or replacing furnaces and weatherstripping.
Craig Heim, head of the state’s Office of Energy Conservation and Weatherization, has called the money a “windfall that could do so much good for Pennsylvania,” according to published reports.
The goal, state officials say, is to reduce energy usage in Pennsylvania. They expect that 30,000 homes would be weatherized over the next three years with the stimulus money.
The $4 million will be in addition to the county agency’s regular weatherization appropriation, expected to total $800,000 this fiscal year, Zimmerman said. That money is from the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)
The people who are eligible for the federal stimulus program will be drawn from a list the state has of persons who applied last year for fuel assistance, she said.
Cambria has its own waiting list of approximately 700 people for the weatherization program, and many of them likely will be on the state list, she said.
“All the details are not yet worked out. We’re excited because we expect to do 700 to 800 homes over the next couple of years,” she said.
Not only homeowners, but renters who meet income guidelines can be eligible for a weatherization program in the home they rent, she said. Under the stimulus program, landlords would be required to pay 25 percent of the costs if a refrigerator or hot water heater has to be replaced if it is not energy efficient, she said.
The agency already has started the process of hiring subcontractors to do the work, although the state has not yet developed how the weatherization workers will be certified, Zimmerman said.
Two auditors have been hired locally to keep the books on the program, she said.
Once the work is completed, the agency will be tracking consumption usage for a year “to see whether it made a difference,” she said.
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