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Even with the thermometer turned down, Hoff, 76 and living on his Social Security benefits, was faced with electric bills of more than $200 a month in the heating season.
Those big bills should be things of the past now that the mobile home has been repaired and weatherized through the weatherization program offered by the Community Action Council of Lewis, Mason and Thurston counties.
“Now I realize I didn’t have to be that cold,” Hoff said.
Hoff qualified for the CAC program, which provides an array of home-weatherization projects for low-income families free of charge to the client.
A crew of four headed up by CAC weatherization program coordinator Sam Dougherty descended on the mobile home in the Martin Way Mobile Home Park this week to help with about $10,000 worth of work repairing the floors and cracked window, adding floor insulation, weather-stripping the front door, sealing up the electric furnace duct work and taking other energy-saving measures.
The energy-conservation package should cut Hoff’s electric bill by more than 50 percent, Dougherty estimated.
“I’ve seen this program help a lot of folks,” Dougherty said.
The nonprofit group serving three counties weatherized 271 homes in the first nine months of 2010, compared with 105 homes in the first nine months of 2009.
The more than doubling of the work load was made possible by $3.5 million in federal funding, primarily through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, according to CAC chief executive officer John Walsh.
The local community action council is working with a share of the nearly $60 million the state received in federal stimulus funds to ramp up weatherization programs for low-income families.
As of Nov. 5, some 7,172 homes have been weatherized statewide since the federal stimulus funds began flowing to the program in July 2009.
“It’s allowed us to serve homes that had been on the back burner,” said Steve Payne, managing director for housing improvements at the state Department of Commerce.
The federal stimulus dollars have allowed the community action council and other weatherization groups around the around the state to beef up their contracting crews and hire more private contractors to do the work. This summer, the federal stimulus funds helped create about 168 jobs, according to a state commerce department report.
The crew deployed to the Martin Way mobile home included Joe Tarsovich, a union carpenter who has had trouble finding work in the economic recession.
“They just brought me on,” he said. “With the economy the way it is, I had to change professions.”
The mobile home the crew worked on is owned by Hoff’s brother, David.
“Lots of people don’t know about his program,” he said. “It’s a good deal if you have the right people to do the work.”
Hoff said the CAC crew passed the test.
John Dodge: 360-754-5444 jdodge@theolympian.com
