WESTFIELD- Westfield Gas & Electric is urging customers who have unpaid bills due to the pandemic to contact the company so a solution can be reached quickly as the May 31 deadline for power shut offs approaches.
General Manager Thomas P. Flaherty said May 13 that there were 1,200 customers with unpaid bills who still had not contacted them. A letter had gone out to 2,000 such customers in April.
Municipal Light Board Ward 6 Commissioner Robert Sacco said that he fears that there may be a wide range of reasons why so many ratepayers have not contacted WG&E.
“There are some people who may take advantage of the moratoriums and not pay until their power cuts off,” said Sacco, “Some people probably were actually hurt by the pandemic and can’t pay.”
Flaherty said that customer service has been working overtime and there was additional training for staff to handle the customers who have not paid their bills.
“We had a brief outage of April 21 and one of the calls that came in was asking if we shut them down for non-payment,” said Flaherty.
Ward 2 Commissioner Ray Rivera said that there may be a lot of people who are embarrassed by the situation they are in as they have not experienced anything like it before in their lives. He suggested that Council on Aging Director Tina Gorman send a blanket message to the senior population of Westfield to urge them to resolve the issue sooner.
Flaherty said he wants to set people up with payment plans that he hopes everybody can pay off by September.
The power shut off moratorium was lifted in March, but WG&E gave ratepayers additional time to figure out how to begin paying their late bills.
“We understand the special circumstances,” said Flaherty in April, “We will work with you to figure out how to get part of the bill paid.”
Customers who may have difficulties paying their overdue bills are encouraged to visit wgeld.org to see what assistance programs may be available to them.
