City faces demands on housing fund

Advocates call for hydro merger cash to go to special program

The city is under pressure to top up an emergency fund that covers unpaid hydro bills for struggling residents now that new utility merger dividends are on the horizon.

Advocates will rally at City Hall Monday to urge councillors to top up the housing stability benefit, a provincially funded pot of cash meant to prevent residents from losing their homes to hydro and rental arrears.

The city has restricted access to the fund and cut some previously eligible costs, like new mattresses and moving costs, in part because increasing requests for help with spiking hydro bills have nearly exhausted a $5.7-million budget meant to last until March.

The new program restrictions could cut off 600 residents who might otherwise have applied for help over the next three months, the city estimated.

“This could end up being a real emergency situation for a lot of vulnerable people as we go into the winter,” said Tom Cooper, director of the Hamilton Roundtable on Poverty Reduc-

tion, who was spreading word about the rally on Sunday.

Brendan Jowett of the Hamilton Community Legal Clinic issued a release Sunday calling for the city to find alternate funding and restore the program immediately to prevent a “homelessness crisis in the making.”

“The (program) can be the difference between being evicted by the Landlord and Tenant Board for rent arrears and having a second chance,” Jowett wrote.

Councillors were not slated to get another formal program update until February.

But council members learned Friday the looming merger of Horizon Utilities with utilities in Vaughan, Markham and Barrie will result in a deal-closing, one-time payment to the city early next year projected to be anywhere from $3 million to $9 million.

A motion for Mayor Fred Eisenberger directed staff to report back with options on how best to use the cash. Councillors at Friday’s meeting tossed around a variety of suggestions, including cutting the 2017 tax hike, fixing failing Claremont Access retaining walls, paying for library projects and topping up the housing stability benefit.

Coun. Sam Merulla, a vocal opponent of the hydro merger, said it would be “irresponsible and wrong” for the city to use merger dividends for anything other than relief “for those people most impacted by spiking hydro rates.”

“We have to address the human deficit before we do anything else with the budget,” said Merulla, who added he would bring up the issue Monday at an afternoon committee meeting.

Eisenberger said on the weekend his original intention was to pitch the one-time hydro cash influx as a way to ease the tax impact of capital spending on the 2017 budget.

A hydro dividend payment of $8 million or more, for example, could in theory cut the average tax hike next year by one per cent. Early budget estimates from last month had council mulling ways to cut a nearly six per cent tax hike, which would have added about $200 to the average tax bill.

The mayor said he’s willing to consider other options, but added he’s “not particularly keen” to use local tax dollars to top up a program that is 100 per cent provincially funded. He said the city is already planning to use the Future Fund and future hydro dividends to invest $50 million in affordable housing and poverty initiatives over the next decade.

The city received about $19 million last year from the province under the Community Homelessness Prevention Initiative. That dedicated funding is slated to rise by about $200,000 a year for the next three years.

It’s wrong to characterize the depleted fund as a provincial funding shortfall, said Laura Gallant, press secretary to Housing Minister Chris Ballard, in a recent email response to a Spectator story on the issue.

She noted the province has already committed to a multi-year increase in overall homelessness funding and city officials have the “flexibility” to allocate the cash as they see fit. Hamilton, not the province, sets the individual budget amount and criteria for the housing stability benefit. Cities across Ontario use that money in different ways.

“If Hamilton believes their local Housing Stability Fund should have more dollars in it, they’re empowered to use their CHPI funds to do so,” Gallant said.