Norton Sound Economic Development Corporation issued a 2016 energy subsidy and the final applications are in. This is the third year in a row residents in the region are getting help paying their utility bills.
Nome was the last community to be tallied up. Those numbers were sent off to NSEDC for verification on Thursday. NSEDC’s Communications Director Laureli Ivanoff said the total payout should be similar to last year’s.
“We were expecting to infuse more than $1.5 million towards household utility expenses,” Ivanoff explained. “That’s what we payed in 2015, so we’re expecting roughly the same this year.”
Sign-up events spanned from the last few weeks of January and into the first week of February. Ivanoff said it’s a big effort to account for every household in the region’s fifteen communities, but, she said, NSEDC was prepared.
“We had people on the ground, we had people on the phone, we had people ready and available to make sure anyone who wanted to take advantage of this subsidy were able to do so,” explained Ivanoff.
The NSEDC Board of Directors voted in December to issue the $575 energy subsidy. If every application from Nome is approved, the payout will exceed $1.5 million.
