Paul Szmal: Welcome back to FLX Morning, it is 8.37 and I'm joined by Gregory Peck, who is the officially the Assistant Administrator for Housing Efficiency and Modification for Finger Lakes Community Action. Greg, good morning. How are you this morning?
Gregory Peck: Good morning. I'm doing well.
Paul Szmal: Excellent. Before we get into the topic du jour for today, let's give people a little bit of a refresh on what exactly the Finger Lakes Community Action Organization is and the purpose.
Gregory Peck: Okay. Well, originally we were called the Wayne County Action Program because a majority of our programs were in Wayne County. We're headquartered in Lyons. We recently had a rebranding calling us Finger Lakes Community Action because now we've reached out to a number of different counties, they being Livingston, Ontario, Seneca, and Cayuga County for a variety of programs. The one we're speaking about today, the Weatherization Action Program, Assistance Program, is for Ontario, Wayne, and Livingston County, so that's what we're doing for that. We have over 600 employees. We're always looking for people to work with us. We have both white-collar and blue-collar jobs. We have part-time jobs, full-time jobs, so if anyone's looking for employment and so forth, they can go to our webpage, fingerlakescommunityaction.org, or give us a call. Our number is 315-333-4155, and I'll repeat that later when we talk about the Weatherization Program.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, let's get into the Weatherization Program. When we're talking about weatherization, what specifically are we looking at?
Gregory Peck: Well, what we're doing is the crux of the program is run by the Home and Community Renewal Grant from New York State. There's different components, but what we're actually doing is we're doing energy audits in people's houses. We're going into their home, and we're looking at where they can save on energy. So we do a variety of things. We install duct and heating pipe insulation. We do repair leaks and heating and cooling ducts. We do installment programs for thermostats. We repair and replace water heaters. We install water heater tank insulation, and we insulate water heating pipes, and we install solar water heating. So anything basically related to heating and cooling in the home is what we're looking at in this program.
Paul Szmal: And who's eligible for this program, and how is that determined?
Gregory Peck: Well, again, our counties are Cayuga, Wayne, and Ontario. It is driven by HUD income guidelines. I'm always sort of slowed down here because then I'm afraid people are going to turn off the reader right away. The income guidelines are quite generous nowadays. You don't need to be poor poor to be involved in our program. For example, if you have a two-family home and you make $45,000, you're eligible for our programs. So I do want to encourage people who may be interested in the program to at least give us a call and we can tell you about it. But those are the populations you serve. You can be a homeowner or a renter. It can be for a single senior or it could be a family of eight. So that's the eligibility, but again, we'll check your income eligibility for that.
Paul Szmal: So if you're deemed to be income eligible to be part of the program, kind of take me through the steps of how this whole process works. What happens is you have to do a formal application as with any program and then you also will have to prove your income eligibility by giving us your tax form, Social Security forms, I-9, all that kind of thing so we can prove that.
Gregory Peck: Then you mail and give us a call with the application and you give us an idea of what you may need, again, where the experts will come in and do the energy audit, but you'll give us an idea. You'll say, gee, our furnace is 45 years old. It's working well right now, but we may have a problem with it later. Our hot water tanks are usually only good for 10 years. So you may say, gee, but we're already at nine years, so this may come up. So it's that kind of thing. You give us an idea, but when we go out and do our energy audit, we'll give you the details on exactly what needs to be done.
Paul Szmal: Gregory Peck from the Finger Lakes Community Action Organization joining us here on FLX Morning. Stuff like this, number one, where does the staffing come from to do all this work? Is this in cooperation with partner agencies, organizations, or people?
Gregory Peck: No, for this program, we have our own in-house staff. Again, it's a grant that we've gotten for a number of years through Homes and Community Renewal, New York State. They do a lot of different grants, so different components in the funding are HEAP. CERC is also there. That's Sustainable Energy Resources for Consumers. That's a federal grant through the Department of Energy. We have something called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which is another grant resource which I could talk about all in one day. We have the American Rescue Plan, and then the Weatherization Readiness Fund. It's a combination of these different funds through New York State with that, but they go under the umbrella of Weatherization Assistance Program, WAP, if you will.
Paul Szmal: Going through the process, you submit the application. The application is approved. The organization comes out, does the energy audit, and determines what needs to be done. What's usually the turnaround time for this from start to finish for the, say, average family homeowner?
Gregory Peck: Well, what it can be, it can be a year, and I know sometimes it's a little bit distressing for a person, but what we do is we do have a waiting list of people going in, and so people think, well, what am I doing here since we have a waiting list? Well, what happens is with any social services organization, a waiting list can go much faster than you think. You call people up. You can't reach them. The phone number doesn't work. They're gone, so you're on to the next person, or you do reach them. Oh, we have a deceased person. The person's no longer in there. You have people that move away, so somebody could go on, and then circumstances is changing and so forth. So we pleasantly get surprised, but we do have to be honest and honorable, and we tell people it's about a year out by the time you actually get services from us, but then the whole process can take probably two months, if you will.
We're also going in there for safety issues. We want to make sure that there aren't other problems. We just recently went to a home out in Marion where we went down the basement steps, and there's no railings in the steps, and they need railings. So we do instigate that through another program to help with safety issues in the house that really have nothing to do with weatherization, but we want to make the homeowner or the renter whole, if you will, so they're safe. So that goes into it as well.
Paul Szmal: Now, is there a particular window of opportunity, application window, or is this open year-round?
Gregory Peck: It's open year-round. So as soon as I get off here, people can call our agency, and then they'll get on a waiting list and so forth. Like I said, it's about year-out right now.
Paul Szmal: All right. We're talking with Greg Peck from the Wayne County Community Action Program, which is now Finger Lakes Community Action, and we're talking about the weatherization program. What do you find the average homeowner needs the most out of the applications that usually come in?
Gregory Peck: It's insulation. It's definitely insulation. In this part of the state, this part of our country, if you will, a lot of the insulation is poor or there's something called balloon houses, if you will. They have no insulation, really, that we go in for and so forth. So that's really what it is. Then the furnace is probably the second thing. With that, a lot of people like to hang on to the furnace. It's been working so well. We've had it there for 60 years. We don't want to monkey with it. But what you don't want to get into is having the furnace break down on you, and you're in trouble now because this is not an emergency program. You can't call us up today and say, you know, my furnace is broken. We need help. That's not going to work. It's not an emergency assistance program. So we do encourage people looking at the age of the furnace, and then we just tell the people, thankfully, it's worked for 60 years. You probably shouldn't press it any longer, you know.
Paul Szmal: Right, right. Now, when you do the energy audit, do you also work with people for things like we know about things like HEAP assistance and some of the other programs that are available? Is that part of the process where you can tell people, all right, these are some of the programs that you might be eligible for that will help lower your costs?
Gregory Peck: We absolutely do. We absolutely do. And we actually help them enroll as well. We actually give assistance because it can be, especially for an older senior and so forth, it can be very burdensome and so forth. But yeah, if you qualify for the weatherization program, you most likely qualify for many, many other programs as well with that. So I will tell you, if anybody's on HEAP right now, you know for sure you can go into the weatherization assistance program.
Paul Szmal: So can you share maybe a success story or two of where, from start to finish, what this program has accomplished for a homeowner?
Gregory Peck: Sure. We had a homeowner in Auburn, and so he was in need of both a furnace and a hot water heater. His furnace was intermittent, if you will. It would go on, it'd click off, sometime at work for a while and not. What also happened, though, in his basement, it was filled with asbestos. So we can't go in there until something else is taken, until that is taken care of. So we do have funds through yet another grant, a private funder, that can come in and fix that kind of thing up. So in his case, we were getting rid of all the asbestos and so forth that was in his cellar. It's a tremendous job, it's not cheap, and there's a lot of regulations and so forth in reference to that. And of course, he thought, well, I've been living with it for so long and everything, but now we're going to go in and put a new furnace in there, so it's going to be disturbed. So we have to do that. So in his case, what he did is he was proactive. He knew his furnace was not working like it should, and he went in there. And then there's hot water heaters, if people don't know, usually a hot water heater lasts for 10 years. If it's over 10 years, you probably should get a new one without waiting for it to pour all over your basement with that. And sometimes people stretch it, and everybody needs to save money. But if you don't, again, it's an emergency situation. Now you've got to come up with the money, and then you've got to get somebody out to your house. So that's what happened there. So that's a success story, and I share it just because this is something else. The asbestos came on top of what we were trying to do with it.
Paul Szmal: Do you often find that when you go in to do these energy audits that you run into situations like that, where you wind up directing people in other avenues, whether it be grants or contractors or things of that nature?
Gregory Peck: Yeah, right. No, absolutely. Absolutely. There's always one more thing that needs to be done, and then it's the homeowner's week. Again, the audit also includes safety things, not just weatherization things. So we'll tell the homeowner, this should be done, this probably should be done, and so forth. Here's some grants you can get for this. Here's some grants for you to get to this. That's an outside kind of thing with your steps. There's no grants really available for that. That's something you have to take care of on your own, and so forth. So we're a pretty honest people, and again, we want to be an encouragement to people, but we're honest with people. If something, we don't know any grant resource for something, and it's usually things that are outside, then we tell them it should be fixed, but you'll have to find the resources for it.
Paul Szmal: So now that we've explained the program and how the process works, if somebody wants to enroll in the program, how does that process begin?
Gregory Peck: So again, the program is called the Weatherization Assistance Program. That's how you're going to phrase it when you call our office. Our number is 315-333-4155, and you're simply going to say, when you call, I'm interested in the Weatherization Assistance Program. My address is such-and-such, whether it be Ontario, Cayuga, or Wayne County, and you give your phone number and email address to our resource person there, who you'll be directed to, and they'll take it, and at that point, they'll just tell you where you are on the waiting list, and so forth, and they'll give you an idea of what kind of forms to gather, financial forms. So it's pretty simple. It's a simple phone call you can do in two minutes. And then once you're on the list, that list can move pretty quickly, and from there it's off to the races. The list does, and I do want to encourage people, the list moves much quickly than people would think. And again, I don't want to discourage people, but it moves pretty quickly. People move out of the area, like I said, there's deceased people, and then there's people that simply, the phone number doesn't work anymore, and we've got to move on, so.
Paul Szmal: Right. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks so much for stopping in and filling us in on all of this, Greg. Much appreciated.
Gregory Peck: All right. And it is 851 on FLX Morning.
