New York State Climate and Environment

Local Reps Blast New York Over Heating Assistance Lapse

“I really felt like the carpet was ripped out from underneath us,” said one county official. The state still hasn’t fully explained why it put HEAP on hold so suddenly.

Colin Kinniburgh · February 7, 2025

A screenshot of a zoom meeting between local social services officials and OTDA officials.

Local social service representatives had stern words Thursday for the state agency overseeing HEAP, a heating assistance program that suddenly closed — and then reopened — last month. | Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance

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Local social service representatives had stern words Thursday for the state agency overseeing HEAP, a heating assistance program that suddenly closed — and then reopened — last month.

“I really felt like the carpet was just ripped out from underneath us here,” Kira Pospesel, social services commissioner for Greene County, told state officials at an advisory council meeting for the Home Energy Assistance Program.

Photo collage: blurred images of the application for New York state's Home Energy Assistance Program, foregrounded by an alarm clock set to 5pm, dollar bills floating away, and a yellow question mark.

New York Won’t Say Why it Froze Heating Assistance in the Middle of Winter

Colin Kinniburgh

The state’s HEAP director, Keri Stark, apologized for the “very chaotic” situation that ensued when applications for the program were abruptly cut off in January, during one of the coldest weeks this winter. She said the state had paid out more benefits in the first months of this season than it did last year, citing colder weather, but did not give a full accounting of how HEAP ground to such a rapid halt.

“It caught the districts off guard,” said Paul Brady, director of the New York Public Welfare Association and a former county social services commissioner.

As of January 24, New York had distributed regular HEAP benefits to about 1.5 million households — 52,000 more than at the same time last year, according to figures that Stark provided during the meeting. That amounts to a roughly $12 million increase in spending from last winter, or about 3 percent of the $360 million New York received from the feds in the fall. It remains unclear why that difference was enough to tip the program into turmoil.

Most social services districts had less than a day’s notice that HEAP was closing, months earlier than scheduled.

Pospesel told New York Focus she got an email from the state just before 11 am on January 21, saying that applications for regular heating benefits would close by 5 pm that day. (Emergency benefits, which are provided to households facing an imminent utility shutoff, remained open.)

The state had previously told the federal government, which funds HEAP, that regular bill assistance would continue through at least mid-March.

“It was the coldest week of the year, the absolute coldest weather that we had, and bang, this all of a sudden happened,” Pospesel told the meeting. “People thought it was a joke.”

Her staff tried to get more clarity from state officials but couldn’t get through. It wasn’t until 4:47 pm that Tuesday, minutes before applications were due to close, that they got a call back, she said. Then the state announced a few days later, on Friday, that HEAP would reopen over the weekend — when most local social services offices are closed — but didn’t give guidance until the following Tuesday on how to handle applications that had been denied during the three-day closure, Pospesel noted.

“How do we run a program this way, and no one knows what’s going on?” she said.

Stark, of the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, said her team is reevaluating applications that were denied during the closure. She said the state is now planning to keep both regular and emergency HEAP applications open through April 11.

Brady, of the Public Welfare Association, asked about the source of the funding that Governor Kathy Hochul pledged to rescue the program.

Stark said it was still unclear whether the announced $35 million would be drawn from within the federal HEAP pool — which covers three programs besides regular bill assistance — or from elsewhere in the state budget, as Hochul implied.

Looking forward, Stark said that uncertainty over funding from Washington meant the state would need to run “a more conservative program.”

“We have not received any word at this time on potential funding” for fiscal year 2026, she said. Stark added that the state plans to conduct a “deep analysis” of how the program was funded before the pandemic — when HEAP got a major boost — and might have to reduce the benefits it distributes per household.

Speaking to New York Focus after the meeting, Pospesel said the prospect of funding cuts made her nervous.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard the word ‘conservative’ used with the HEAP program,” she said. “It was always, ‘Let’s find all the people who are potentially eligible and make sure we get everything out there.’”

“So, what direction are they going?” she continued. “Have we built a program that’s unsustainable, and who’s going to pay for it?”