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More than $6.4 million in grants will give 15 hundred low-income families in Southwest Missouri the chance to weatherize their homes, a process that can reduce utility bills. The money is part of the federal economic stimulus funds that Missouri received. KSMU’s Missy Shelton reports.
Julie Henigan opened her Springfield home to Governor Jay Nixon, state and local officials, and reporters. Her house, which was built in 1915, is being weatherized.
Henigan says, “It will help me a great deal with what was a very drafty house, making it a lot tighter so I don’t have to go around with frozen feet in the winter, and just really make it more economically and energy efficient house.”
Besides making homes more energy efficient, the weatherization process also involves safety inspections of gas appliances. Julie’s house was the back-drop for an announcement by Nixon about Southwest Missouri community action agencies receiving federal funding for weatherization programs. Nixon says these programs benefit low income households.
Nixon says, “The purpose of weatherization assistance is to help those households that have challenges with their home energy bills, especially the elderly, the disabled and those with young children.”
The Ozarks Area Community Action Corporation or OACAC will receive more than $2.2 million in this latest round of grant funding. That’s on top of the more than $7 million the agency received previously. OACAC Director of Weatherization Todd Steinmann says besides helping homeowners, this money will also put people to work.
Steinmann says, “We have created 31 direct new jobs, 14 new jobs with our contractors and because of this funding, we’ll be able to do 2200 homes in our 10 county area now through March 31, 2012. To put that into perspective, an average year for us in the past was around 200 homes, so we’re going to be doing at least 2200 in the three year span so you can see the increase in that.”
Steinmann says OACAC is hoping to pick up another $2.7 million dollars in stimulus funding by the end of June, allowing it to provide weatherization for even more homes.
