About 10-thousand poor Iowans are still trying to pay off the heating bills from two winters ago. Jerry McKim runs the state’s Low Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program.McKim says even though prices for propane, natural gas and heating oil have dropped from the price spikes of two years ago, low-income Iowans haven’t been able to keep up.McKim says the winter of 2000/2001 is just a bad memory for most of us, while the very low income are still weighed down by the debt they racked up trying to heat their homes. He says people who’re trying to recover from high bills two years ago will have an even harder time if it’s a hard winter this year.McKim says the number of households with past due accounts always peaks in January when prices for fuel are at their highest. For the past two years, that January price spike has pushed about 20-thousand Iowa households into “past due” status on their utility bills.
