Water Sector News
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Low-income water assistance program set to end
More Americans, and particularly more children, are living in poverty today as crucial assistance programs created during the pandemic disappear, a U.S. Census report noted last week.
Now, another assistance program is set to go away. In a week and a half, on Sept. 30, a program that has helped more than a million people pay their water bills will expire unless Congress acts to reauthorize it.
Since its inception in 2020, the Low Income Household Water Assistance Program, or LIHWAP, has distributed about $1.1 billion to states, who pass the money on to water utilities to help pay the bills of people making 150 percent of the federal poverty line, or $37,290 for a family of three. In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2022, the program kept 228,000 from losing service and helped restore service to about 30,000 households who had had their water shut off.