After an unseasonably warm few months, winter struck Pennsylvania with a vengeance in recent weeks - with temperatures dropping to 9 degrees on Valentines Day weekend.

For many families in the Keystone State, the bitter cold meant a weekend indoors, curled up on the couch with a hot beverage in hand.

But, for an unprecedented number of other Pennsylvanians, the plummeting temperatures had far more dire implications.

According to a PennLive's analysis of Public Utility Commission data, the number of Pennsylvanian households that have had their service shut off by the state's regulated gas and electric utility companies has soared to record-breaking levels in recent years.

In the 1990s, an average of 81,000 households had their service terminated each year. In 2014, the most recent year that complete data is available, more than 312,000 households had their service terminated* - nearly four times higher.

Although Pennsylvania bans its major utility companies from cutting service to low-income customers during winter - from Dec. 1 to March 31 - data from the commission shows that rising numbers of shut-off Pennsylvanians are either abandoning their homes or failing to reconnect their central heating source before winter begins.

For advocates for low-income Pennsylvanians, the trend is deeply distressing: it means thousands of Pennsylvanians, from young children to the elderly, are living in life-threatening cold or using sources of heat, like kitchen ovens and space heaters, that pose fire risks.

"We have never seen winter termination statistics like we are seeing now - never," said Robert Ballenger, an attorney for Community Legal Services Philadelphia. "And if you just look at the electric numbers it's pretty remarkable."

What's going on?

Ballenger and other advocates say that there are several factors driving Pennsylvania's rising shutoffs: high unemployment as the state recovers from the recession; decades of stagnant wage growth; rising electricity prices; and new computerized systems that allow Pennsylvania's utility companies to better track and flag errant customers.

But the biggest factor driving that surge in shutoffs, they say, is a law passed by the General Assembly in 2004 that made it easier for Pennsylvania's regulated utility companies to terminate customers for getting behind on their bills.

That law change, Act 201 of 2004, added a slew of provisions designed to make it easier for utilities to collect customer debt under a new chapter in Pennsylvania's Public Utility Code: Chapter 14. Those provisions were renewed by the General Assembly in 2014.

Pennsylvania's utility companies argued in 2004, as they did again in 2014, that they needed those new powers in order to rein in customers who could pay their bills but were willfully choosing not to.

Terry Fitzpatrick, CEO and President of the Energy Association of Pennsylvania, maintains that the law provides essential tools for utility companies to prevent customers from defrauding them.

"We are certainly not talking about most customers," Fitzpatrick said. "But it's an unfortunate reality that some folks who see what the rules are and know how to get around them will choose to get around them."

For advocates like Ballenger, however, there has never been evidence that large numbers of customers were exploiting customer protections before 2004. Instead, he believes the law has simply punished Pennsylvania's poorest citizens - people, he believes, who want to pay their bills on time but struggle.

"Chapter 14 really undermined customer protections," Ballenger said. "It's left Pennsylvania's most vulnerable low-income families directly in harm's way and resulted in epidemic levels of terminations and families entering the winter without heat."

A new collection tool

Fitzpatrick, for his part, doesn't dispute that annual shutoffs have risen in Pennsylvania.

But Fitzpatrick said he doesn't think it's fair to look at that rise in shutoffs without also looking at the number of households who have had their service reconnected.

"If you just look at terminations you might think all those people are without service," he said. "But an increasing number of them end up being reconnected."

For Fitzpatrick's association, that's evidence that before 2004 some Pennsylvanians could pay their bills but were choosing not to.

From a personal perspective, Fitzpatrick said, as a former commissioner of the Public Utility Commissioner between 1999 to 2007, he felt that he saw too many customers exploiting the state's protections for utility customers.

Before the passage of Chapter 14, low-income customers who repeatedly got behind on their bills, and had their service threatened with termination, could call the Public Utility Commission and have the commission arrange a new payment agreement with their utility.

But Fitzpatrick said he saw instances of consumers who would break their payment agreement repeatedly, seemingly willfully, and rack up bills that spanned decades.

However, owing to precedents already set by the commission, Fitzgerald said that it would have to approve those new agreements without any consequences for the household.

When a bill was proposed in the General Assembly that would largely require customers to negotiate those agreements with their utility companies instead of the commission - what would become Chapter 14 - Fitzpatrick was a supporter.

"I thought, this makes sense, we really do need to hit the reset button on some of these policies," Fitzpatrick said.

Ultimately, Fitzpatrick said, he feels Chapter 14 has been a boon for all Pennsylvania's utility customers because it had helped utility companies recoup unpaid bills that would otherwise have led to losses that would have to be compensated for by price increases for all customers.

"We don't like to terminate service," he said. "But I think the hard truth is that if we don't we have uncollectible expenses that shoot up and someone has to pay for that."

Advocates unconvinced

But Ballenger and other advocates for low-income Pennsylvanians say those arguments are either flawed or misleading.

Firstly, Ballenger said, while it's true that reconnection figures have risen with terminations, there is still a growing gap between them.

In 2002, there was a difference of 61,000 between the number of households that had their service terminated compared to those that had their service reconnected. Last year the difference was 82,000*.

But more importantly, Ballenger said, the reconnection numbers don't offer any indication of how long a household went without service before it was reconnected

"You're placing a family, most times, directly in harm's way when you terminate utility service," Ballenger said. "To count the ability to reconnect as a successful outcome ignores the social cost of that to that family."

Ballenger added that because Chapter 14 leaves payment agreements largely in the hands of utility companies, reconnection itself is often particularly onerous for poor Pennsylvanian families.

Typically, Ballenger said, after a customer breaks a payment agreement when they've already broken a previous agreement, utility companies require full payment of the back balance that they owe - which might be thousands of dollars - before they will restore service.

Ballenger said that means a family might have to forgo nourishing food, or health care, or medication, or get into debt in other ways, just to get service.

"It's hard not to share in the sense of hopelessness that a lot of our clients have when the law doesn't provide any remedy," Ballenger said. "The process that's available to so many of our customers is bankruptcy."

Has debt collection improved?

Beyond their criticisms of the Energy Association of Pennsylvania's argument about reconnections, advocates for low-income Pennsylvanians are deeply skeptical that the enhanced collection powers granted to utility companies under Chapter 14 were necessary to begin with.

Patrick Cicero, executive director of the Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, said that the perceived need for Chapter 14 was spurred by concerns about the financial position of PGW, Philadelphia's city-owned gas utility, in the early 2000s.

Cicero said that Philadelphia lawmakers pushed for a law change in the General Assembly that would give PGW greater collections powers. That bill then morphed into something broader: Pennsylvania's other regulated utility companies wanted similar collection powers as PGW.

"It then became a Christmas tree," Cicero said. "Everyone hung their favorite ornament on it."

But Cicero said that PGW's financial position had already improved by 2004 and that its problems were the result of management decisions - including the failure of its computer billing system in 1999 - rather than insufficient powers to collect bills from customers.

He said it was even less necessary that those collection powers were extended to Pennsylvania's other regulated utilities which had not experienced any recent financial problems.

A 2006 report by Joseph Rhodes, a former commissioner of the Public Utility Commission and state lawmaker, sides with that view.

Rhodes was contracted by the Democratic House Appropriations Committee to investigate the impact of chapter 14 after its implementation. In his report he noted that he could find no evidence that the utility companies didn't already have the tools necessary to manage customers' overdue bills.

"Most of the evidence that I have received is anecdotal and since there was no hearings on [chapter 14] there has been no official forum that would permit an official refutation of even this evidence," Rhodes wrote.

Perhaps worse than that, Cicero said, even with the broader collection powers granted under Chapter 14, he doesn't believe there's evidence that Pennsylvania's major regulated utilities have reduced uncollectible debt since 2004.

"I don't think there's much data that it has improved," he said.

A PennLive analysis of collections that tracked by the Public Utility Commission shows an unclear picture of whether collection performance has improved among the state's major regulated utility companies since 2004.

Some metrics, like the annual amount of money that Pennsylvania's utilities have spent on collections, have fallen since 2004.

But other metrics, like the amount of outstanding money owed by customers to their gas utility companies, has risen since 2004.

Asked what to make of the mixed statistics on collection performance, Fitzpatrick said a variety of factors impacted those metrics: the state of the economy, fuel prices, the installation of new computer systems by utilities, different philosophies among companies about how to use the tools Chapter 14 provided.

That said, Fitzpatrick maintained that the overall numbers showed that Chapter 14 has improved collection performance.

"I think you need to look at all of them to get a well-rounded perspective of what's happening," he said.

But Cicero said that, by looking at all of those factors - and keeping in mind factors alluded to by Fitzpatrick, like the fall of natural gas prices since 2008 - the suggestion that Chapter 14 has improved collection performance doesn't appear at all clear in the statistics.

"If the average arrearage shot up right after the passage of Chapter 14 and remained the same, how have collections improved as a result of that?" Cicero said.

A push for repeal

It's for those reasons that Cicero and Ballenger maintain that Chapter 14 needs to either be repealed or its most problematic aspects amended.

In particular, both men would like to see the revocation of Chapter 14's key provision: that low-income customers can't go to the Public Utility Commission to negotiate payment agreements with their utility.

More than that though, Ballenger said, the rise in shutoffs caused by Chapter 14 is intertwined with another issue: Pennsylvania's customer assistance programs, which are intended to provide discounted bills to low-income Pennsylvanians, don't provide affordable bills.

In Pennsylvania, the maximum amount that a customer on one of those programs can pay for both gas and heat is 17 percent of their income. But Ballenger said that in Ohio the rate is 12 percent and in New Jersey it's only 6 percent.

"So we have the erosion of consumer protections on top of programs that really don't always target affordability," Ballenger said.

Ultimately, Ballenger said, the state had its best chance to repeal or significantly alter the law in 2014 when it was set to expire. Instead, to the dismay of himself and others, it was renewed.

Although last year's termination figures have not been released yet, Ballenger said that all signs point to the continuation of the post-2004 trend.

"Things have not gotten better, things have gotten worse," Ballenger said. "And until it's corrected we think we are going to continue to see these really alarming numbers of families that are put out in the cold."

*PennLive's analysis of historical termination and reconnection data in this story has excluded or separated data on PGW, Philadelphia's city-owned gas utility, because the company wasn't required to report data to the Public Utility Commission prior to 2004. With PGW's data included, Pennsylvania's major regulated utilities terminated a total of 341,710 residences in 2014 and reconnected 238,755.

Graphics by Nick Malawskey