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HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Robert Douglass, 38, still remembers the week that his Harrisburg home was so cold that his family couldn't shower. Although it had been nine months since their gas had been shut off, bathing, at least, had not been a problem for Douglass's family. Their water heater ran on electricity. But as temperatures plunged into the high 20s and low 30s in December, it became too cold for Douglass, his wife, or his mother to even step out of the shower. Douglass' two children, ages 1 and 5, went without baths for a week. "To get in a tub of hot water and then out into the cold, that's just asking for trouble," Douglass said. "Kids can't deal with that kind of weather." Last year, Douglass' household was one of more than 300,000 to have their gas or electric service shut off - part of an unprecedented surge in terminations across the state. Advocates for low-income Pennsylvanians say that the plight of Douglass and other Pennsylvanians has been driven by two major factors: a 2004 law change that made it easier for utility companies to terminate customers for failing to pay their bills and state policies that fail to adequately subsidize bills for the poor. For families like the Douglass', they say, those policies are increasingly exposing young children to unsafe temperatures and putting new pressures on already strained households. "People are so desperate over their circumstances," said Kay Pickering, program coordinator for the Harrisburg Center for Peace and Justice, which helps low-income households. "It makes them angry, it makes them depressed and, in a lot of cases, it makes them unable to function." A fraught history Douglass' family, who reside in uptown Harrisburg, have a long history of struggling to pay their utility bills. Douglass has bipolar disorder and has subsisted on Social Security disability payments since 2006 following a 2004 injury on a construction site. He lives with his wife, his mother, his two children, and his brother and his brother's wife. Douglass' mother is, according to her and Douglass, borderline intellectually disabled. She, like her son, subsists on social security disability payments. Meanwhile, Douglass' brother, who suffers from a degenerated disc in his neck, is in a legal fight for social security disability himself. Between Douglass' disability check and his mother's, the family's gross income is about $1,400 - about $700 after rent. Douglass says he has frequently turned to panhandling over the years to make ends meet. More recently, his wife, Shelley Tart, got a job as a cashier that nets about $100 each month, but her hours are sporadic. Consequently, Douglass' family has often struggled to pay its utility bills. The family's trouble with UGI, in particular, began around 2012 when Douglass thought he could put off paying a monthly bill in order to prioritize expenses for his 1-year old daughter. "She was growing faster than we could put her in clothes," Douglass said. "So I had to keep extra money on the side because she needed new clothes, new shoes." But getting behind on that month's bill spiraled into getting behind on the next month's bill - and then the one after that. Douglass had his service terminated briefly during the warmer months of the year but got it restored. In 2014, Douglas again lost and regained his service before the cold set in. By the end of that year, according to Douglass, his relationship with UGI was relatively stable. UGI had placed him in its customer assistance program - a state mandated program that requires utilities to discount bills for Pennsylvanians who earn 150 percent or less of the federal poverty level. Douglass's monthly bills were capped at $127 and part of those payments went to paying off his existing debt with the company. But in April of last year, Douglass made a mistake that would eclipse any of his previous indiscretions with UGI. That month, according to Douglass, his monthly usage had fallen to only $40 - significantly less than the fixed $127 he was supposed to pay as part of UGI's customer assistance program. Douglass said that he believed this meant he was supposed to call UGI and ask to be removed from the program until his monthly bills exceeded $127 again. But the next month, Douglass discovered that by exiting the program he had inadvertently broken his plan to pay the debt he owed to the company - Douglass said the company wanted the entirety of the $2,351 that he owed it. Joseph Swope, a UGI spokesman, declined to discuss Douglass's case with a PennLive reporter citing, via email, a "long-standing corporate policy to not disclose personal information of our customers." However, in response to a general question, Swope said that customers on the company's customer assistance program don't need to contact the company when there is a change in usage - only income. Pickering, the program coordinator for the Harrisburg Center for Peace and Justice, said that Douglass's misunderstanding was not uncommon. Pickering works with low-income households and has worked closely with Douglass over the years. She said that her clients, particularly those on disability or with mental health issues, typically misunderstand aspects of their payment plans. "What they don't understand is the full aspect of the total program - and it's complicated - the full aspect that you have to pay on time and there's a percentage of debt forgiveness," Pickering said. Before 2004, a customer like Douglass, threatened with termination, could have called the Public Utility Commission. The commission would have been able to negotiate a new payment agreement with UGI on Douglass's behalf to avoid disconnection of his service. But since the addition of Chapter 14 of the Public Utility Code in 2014, the commission has been prohibited from arranging those payments for low-income customers that are part of a customer assistance program. Instead, customers like Douglass must now negotiate those agreements directly with their utility company - and the company doesn't have to make a new agreement if a customer has already broken a previous one. In Douglass's case, UGI refused to give him a new payment plan. It wanted the $2,351 he owed. Unable to pay, Douglass's gas service was switched off in April. 'We had to huddle' Although Chapter 14 meant the Public Utility Commission's hands were tied in situations like his, Douglass contacted the commission for help a week after his shutoff anyway. But that call to the commission actually created new problems for Douglass: the commission referred him back to UGI and, according to Douglass, UGI's representatives then kept referring him back to the commission. "So they're pushing all the blame on PUC why they can't make a deal with me," he said. Pickering said that was also not an unusual problem for her clients. "When people come to me and say, 'oh I went to the PUC', I say 'whoa,' " Pickering said. "I suggest they use the PUC as a total, total last resort because it's very rare that I see the PUC take a different stance than the utility." Initially, aided by the warmth of the summer months, the lack of natural gas didn't negatively affect Douglass's family. But by October, with the temperature dropping and his frequent calls to UGI still going nowhere, Douglass was beginning to panic. He borrowed a space heater from a friend and found another unit in his basement - but by November, as evening temperatures sank into the thirties, the heaters made little difference in their drafty, 110-year-old row home. "If we were downstairs we had to huddle around one on the couch," Douglass said. "There would be three adults and two children on the couch, just watching TV, just trying to stay warm." Douglass's family bundled up with extra blankets at night and wore double and triple layers of clothes during the day. They started running out of clean clothes by the end of the week because they would wear so many. But even with the extra layers, Douglass's daughter got sick and Anderson, his 58-year old mother, caught bronchial pneumonia. "With my age, I can't hold body heat very well," Anderson said. "I'd sit all day in front of this heater." Douglass briefly feared that his son, who had been born only a year prior, had pneumonia too. "He was running high 90s fevers, constantly coughing and sneezing - up all night," Douglass said. "He barely could eat." Meanwhile, Douglass and his wife were fearful that their neighbors would discover their gas service had been cut and would alert Dauphin County's social service department - they were scared that would lose custody of their children. They were also facing unexpected problems: Without heat, Douglass's water pipes almost froze. The family had to put one of their heaters in the basement to keep the pipes from freezing. But events reached their nadir in December when Harrisburg faced a particularly cold week, where temperatures fell to the mid 20s at night. "We couldn't even take baths, that's how bad it was," Douglass said. "We couldn't even give the kids baths. It was too cold getting out of the tub in the house without the heat on." Over the course of his continued phone calls with UGI, Douglass tried to explain that he had two small children in the house that might be endangered by the cold. But he felt those words fell on deaf ears. "They didn't want to budge," he said. An uncertain future It was only in mid-December, after that particularly cold week, that Douglass was finally able to restore service. Douglass managed to scrape together a $1,400 payment to UGI - $600 from a federal assistance program, $400 from a UGI assistance program, $200 from Pickering and $200 out of Douglass's own pocket. Although it was less than the $2,351 that he owed the company, UGI agreed - after more calls than Douglass can count - to accept the money and turn his gas back on. On a chill Monday afternoon in February, Douglass' family sat in their living room - pleasantly toasty - around their television set. Sitting on the stairs, Douglass watched his 1-year-old son play in the arms of his mother and his grandmother on the couch. While Douglass is pleased to have his gas service restored, the memories of his time without it are still raw. Douglass accepts he made mistakes, but he also says he wasn't trying to defraud the UGI - he was simply juggling his limited funds as best he could for his family. "They do not take into consideration that there are people on disability and do not have the kind of money that they're asking for," Douglass said. That's a point that Pickering largely agrees with. She said part of the reason that families like Douglass so frequently get in debt is that Pennsylvania's customer assistance programs - those state mandated programs that discount utility bills for low-income Pennsylvanians - don't set affordable rates. In Pennsylvania, a low-income household in one of those programs can be expected to pay up to 17 percent of their income for electric and gas service. By comparison, that threshold is 12 percent in Ohio and 6 percent in New Jersey. "I just know that in a lot of circumstances that when people come to me, they agree to the (customer assistance program) amount but they couldn't really pay that amount," Pickering said. Douglass's new customer assistance program rate with UGI hasn't been set yet. For the moment, however, he has bigger problems. By using $200 from his monthly social security check to pay UGI to get his service reconnected, he had to avoid paying other utility bills - threatening to repeat the cycle all over again. "We've been struggling," Douglass said. "I literally just got my check yesterday and I'm broke already." ___ Online: http://bit.ly/21t5EwL ___ Information from: Pennlive.com, http://www.pennlive.com

Advocates blame law change, policies for people left in cold