Katherine Korman was 82 years old and lived alone in Sun City West. APS remotely disconnected her electricity on May 13, 2024, for nonpayment. The high that day was about 99 degrees. She was found dead six days later. The medical examiner listed complications of chronic ethanolism, with environmental heat stress as a contributing factor. Her sons say she likely had the money to pay. She just didn't know she owed it.
APS said it had contacted Korman ten times with past-due and disconnection notices. Mail, email, door hanger. Never spoke with her in person or by phone. Her sons wrote to the ACC that her unpaid balance first started accumulating during the 2023 summer moratorium, that she'd paid $1,126.88 in late December to clear it, and that she apparently believed autopay had restarted when it hadn't. Three months of missed bills. A door hanger and two emails five days before shutoff. Then nothing, then heat, then death.
The Arizona Attorney General's $7 million settlement with APS in April 2026 required the utility to reinstate a 95-degree disconnection hold outside the summer moratorium window, add text alerts, and improve its emergency-contact program. APS admitted no wrongdoing. Seven million dollars and no wrongdoing. The English language is a flexible instrument.
Korman died thirteen days before the moratorium started. The moratorium exists because of people like her. What follows is about what the moratorium actually does to the people it protects. And Korman's case makes a point worth nailing down right here: even a household that can afford the bill can be wrecked by the arrears-and-notification machinery. The system's failures aren't only about income. They're about the distance between how institutions process paper and how human beings live.
June 1: Protection Begins, the Meter Doesn't Stop
Every year on June 1, APS's disconnection moratorium kicks in. Residential service won't be cut for nonpayment until October 16. SRP runs a shorter version, July through August, extended only if the National Weather Service issues additional Extreme Heat Warnings. Two months instead of four and a half. If you picked the wrong utility service territory to be poor in, that's your problem.
The moratorium is real protection. It keeps compressors running and people alive during the months when losing electricity can kill you in hours. Nobody serious argues it shouldn't exist.
But the language on APS's own customer page says what needs saying: bills remain due during the moratorium period. Protection against disconnection is not protection against the bill. The meter runs. The balance grows. The moratorium takes a survival problem and converts it into a debt problem, and the debt problem has its own calendar.
People who study this for a living have been arguing for years about whether moratoria, by letting arrears pile up unchecked for months, create downstream financial damage that partially cancels out the upstream protection. Consumer advocates say one thing, utility regulators say another, and the utilities themselves have opinions they're happy to share at length. The moratorium prevents summer deaths. It also builds the October cliff. Both are true, and the disagreement about whether you can fix the second without weakening the first shapes every design choice downstream: how long the moratorium runs, whether arrears forgiveness comes with it, what payment-plan terms apply when it ends. I mention this because the tension is real and unresolved, not because anyone involved has clean hands.
Every institution in this chain runs its own clock. The utility billing clock. The moratorium clock. The LIHEAP application clock. The AC repair clock. The landlord-response clock. The payment-arrangement clock. Each one ticks along at its own pace, perfectly indifferent to the others. The household is the only mechanism synchronizing all of them at once, and nobody gave the household a manual or a staff.
What Four Months Cost
EIA-derived data puts the average Arizona residential electricity bill through the peak summer months as follows:
| Month | Avg. Bill |
|---|---|
| June | $210.56 |
| July | $254.85 |
| August | $263.06 |
| September | $200.33 |
| Four-month total | $928.80 |
Nationally, NEADA has documented summer cooling costs running roughly 10.5% above baseline, a trend that hits hardest in places where air conditioning is not a luxury or a comfort but the difference between living and dying. Arizona sits at the dead center of that map.
These are averages. They include the two-bedroom apartment and the four-bedroom ranch house, the family that sets the thermostat at 78 and the one that can't get the house below 85 because the unit is twenty years old and undersized for the load. They include households on APS's current rates and households watching the proposed 14% rate increase now pending before the ACC, with a decision expected by year's end. APS says it needs the increase for infrastructure and reliability. Intervenors contest the size and allocation. The ACC hearing ended July 7, 2026. What matters for the household trying to budget its summer is that the rate trajectory is uncertain and upward, and the moratorium doesn't adjust for rate increases any more than it adjusts for the bill itself. SRP approved a 2.4% overall increase starting November 2025, adding about $5.61 per month for the average residential customer. Small mercies.
A household that can't pay its summer bills accumulates roughly $230 per month in arrears during the moratorium. By October 16, that's north of $900 in new debt, on top of whatever was already owed. For a household at 60% of state median income, the LIHEAP eligibility ceiling in Arizona, $900 is a crisis with a date stamped on it.
The Assistance That Exists and What It Covers
Arizona's FY2026 LIHEAP cooling-assistance benefit runs from $160 minimum to $640 maximum. Crisis assistance caps at $500. The state's LIHEAP plan puts 38.12% of available funds toward cooling assistance, roughly $13.5 million from a total state allocation of about $35.5 million.
In FY2024, Arizona served 24,978 households with cooling assistance.
Maximum LIHEAP cooling benefit: $640. Average four-month summer bill: $929. The gap is $289 even at the maximum, which most applicants don't receive.
And that's if you get anything at all. Twenty-five thousand households served, in a metro area where summer electricity is not optional and where the population below 60% of median income vastly exceeds that number. I don't have an Arizona-specific count of eligible households that didn't receive assistance. Nobody publishes that figure in a way that makes it easy to find, which tells you something about whether the system was designed to measure its own adequacy or to avoid measuring it.
The state plan specifies that life-threatening crisis intervention must occur within 18 hours and ordinary energy-crisis intervention within 48 hours. These are processing timelines, not resolution timelines. Reviewed is a milestone word. Paid is a condition word. The distance between them is where people actually live, and it can be measured in degrees Fahrenheit.
July: AC Present, AC Broken
In 2025, Maricopa County recorded 430 heat-associated deaths. Among those that occurred indoors, an air-conditioning unit was present in 94% of cases. Seventy-two percent of those units were not functioning.
I've been sitting with this statistic for a while now, and the thing that won't leave me alone is the taxonomy. "Has AC: yes" records machine presence, not human situation. The category tells you the appliance exists. It doesn't tell you the compressor seized in July, the landlord hasn't returned a call, and the indoor temperature is climbing past the point where the body stops being able to cool itself. The official record creates a kind of false assurance that may be worse than no data at all, because it lets everyone involved believe the problem is solved by the existence of a metal box on a concrete pad outside the window.
What does it cost to fix the metal box? Market cost guides put a Phoenix compressor replacement at $1,500 to $6,000. Full system replacement can run to $12,700. In a summer when every HVAC contractor in the Valley is booked out past next Tuesday, the wait isn't measured in days. It's measured in weeks of indoor temperatures the human body was not engineered to survive.
Maricopa County runs an Emergency Home Repair Program that covers non-functioning AC for homeowners at or below 80% of area median income. The program provides portable AC units while work is completed. Typical project completion: two to four weeks. Funds are limited. The county prioritizes non-functioning cooling during extreme temperatures, households with members over 62, and other vulnerability factors.
Two to four weeks. In Phoenix. In July. With a portable unit cooling one room of the house while the rest of it bakes.
The program exists. It helps people. Those two facts and the scale of the problem occupy the same space without resolving into anything comfortable, and I'm not going to pretend they do.
The Rental Trap
For renters, the machinery has an additional gear.
Arizona law requires landlords to maintain cooling systems in good and safe working order. The Attorney General specified in April 2026 that rental units using AC in Phoenix and Tucson cannot exceed 82 degrees in habitable rooms. Landlords must act within five days of written notice when temperatures pose a health and safety risk.
Now here's the part that sounds like somebody made a mistake in the drafting but nobody did. Arizona courts' tenant guidance clarifies that under A.R.S. § 33-1364(H), the tenant does not have the right to repair the cooling fixture. The tenant must give written notice. The landlord has five days. If the landlord doesn't act, the tenant's remedies are legal, not mechanical. You can't fix it yourself and deduct the cost. You can file a complaint. In July. In Phoenix. While you wait.
So the sequence for a renter whose AC dies in the middle of summer goes like this: notice the unit is failing, give written notice to the landlord, wait five days for a response, and if nothing happens, pursue legal remedies while living in a residence that may be 95 degrees indoors. The AG sent cease-and-desist letters to Aspire West Apartments in Phoenix and Lumina on 19th Apartments in Tucson after residents reported that management refused to activate chiller systems despite indoor temperatures exceeding legal limits. Those residents lived inside the gap between the law's promise and the law's timeline. The enforcement mechanism works. It works at the speed of enforcement, which is not the speed of heat stroke.
Meanwhile the electricity bill for running a failing unit that cycles constantly without cooling the space is higher than the bill for a functioning one. The tenant pays for the electricity the broken compressor wastes. The landlord pays for the repair, eventually, if the tenant knows the law, provides written notice in the correct form, and survives the response window. The billing clock and the repair clock and the legal clock all run at different speeds, and the person sitting in the hot apartment is the only one experiencing all three simultaneously. I have watched this same arrangement play out in different industries for fifty years. Each institution does its job on its own schedule, and the human being at the center holds it all together with whatever strength they've got left.
October 16: The Cliff
When the moratorium ends, the accumulated balance becomes actionable. APS automatically enrolls customers with past-due balances over $75 in a payment arrangement. Service can be disconnected if the balance exceeds $300 and the customer doesn't pay current charges plus the arrangement amount by the due date.
The best public data point on the scale of this cliff comes from 2019, when APS disclosed that 88,000 customers had back bills totaling about $30 million as the moratorium ended. Average of $341 per household. Enough to trigger disconnection under current rules. Eighty-eight thousand households hitting the same cliff on the same date, each one managing the debt individually, as though the problem were a personal failing rather than a structural event.
SRP's version is structurally similar: customers with past-due balances over $80 enter an eight-month payment plan. But SRP adds a clause worth reading twice. If a customer misses the amount due under the payment plan, the plan is canceled and the entire past-due balance becomes due in full.
Think about what that means. You owe $900 from the summer. You're placed on an eight-month plan. You make three payments. You miss the fourth because the car broke down or the hours got cut or the kid needed antibiotics. The plan collapses. The full remaining balance is due immediately. Those three payments you made bought you time but not safety. Miss once and you're back to the full amount, except now it's January and the next moratorium is five months away.
SRP's prepaid M-Power system makes the mechanism even more naked. When credit runs out during the moratorium and power stays on, the account accumulates debt. SRP then deducts from future purchases:
| Past-Due Balance | Deduction Rate |
|---|---|
| Under $500 | 35% of each purchase |
| $500–$1,000 | 50% of each purchase |
| Over $1,000 | 70% of each purchase (50% if income-qualified) |
A household that owes $1,100 from the summer buys $100 of electricity credit in November and gets $30 of actual power. The other $70 goes to paying off July. You are buying yesterday's survival with tomorrow's electricity, and the exchange rate gets worse the deeper you went into debt staying alive. If someone designed this as a parable about American poverty, you'd say they were being heavy-handed.
The Full Mechanism
The moratorium is the only piece of this system designed to prevent death. Everything else is designed to manage debt.
The moratorium keeps you alive through the summer. The billing system charges you for every kilowatt-hour you used staying alive. LIHEAP offers $640 toward your $929 problem. The payment plan gives you eight months but collapses if you miss once. The repair program gets to you in two to four weeks. The landlord-tenant statute gives your landlord five days and forbids you from picking up a wrench yourself. Each piece functions on its own terms. Nobody is responsible for the total picture. I have spent a fair portion of my life watching how institutions process human beings, on ships and job sites and in union halls and government offices, and the pattern is always the same: each outfit does its bounded job tolerably well, and the person at the center holds all the bounded jobs together with whatever they've got, which is usually not enough, which is nobody's department.
Katherine Korman's arrears began during the 2023 moratorium. She cleared them in December with an $1,127 payment. Then the cycle started again. She died in May, before the next moratorium could protect her, killed in the gap between one protection window and the next. The 2026 settlement requires APS to do better on notifications. It does not change the structure that makes the notifications necessary. Seven million dollars bought better door hangers.
What a Household Faces
Nobody in this chain asks what matters most to the person living inside it: what is my total exposure across all of these systems at once? The utility knows the bill. LIHEAP knows the application. The landlord knows the unit. The county knows the repair queue. The ACC knows the rate case. Nobody knows the whole picture except the household, and the household has no institutional standing to act on what it knows.
So here are the questions worth asking before June, if you're in a position where the summer bill is going to be a problem. I offer them not as solutions but as the questions the system doesn't bother to surface on your behalf, because surfacing them would mean admitting the system has seams:
- Is the AC unit actually working, or is it running without cooling? A unit that cycles without reaching setpoint costs more to operate and will fail sooner. The time to find out is April, not July.
- If you rent, does your lease specify cooling? Have you documented the unit's condition in writing? Arizona law gives your landlord five days for health-and-safety repairs, but only after written notice. The clock doesn't start on a phone call.
- What is your utility's moratorium window? APS runs June 1 through October 15. SRP runs July through August. If you're on SRP, your protection window is two months shorter.
- If you're going to carry a balance through the summer, do you know the payment-plan terms that will apply in October? Do you know what happens if you miss one payment on that plan?
- Have you applied for LIHEAP cooling assistance? The benefit won't cover the full summer bill. It will reduce the October balance. The application exists at 211arizona.org and through local community action agencies.
You manage all of it at once, in a house that may be 98 degrees, with a balance climbing toward a cliff that arrives on a date certain in October. The utility, the moratorium, the assistance office, the landlord, the county, the rate commission. Each one handles its piece. You hold the pieces together.
The moratorium is the floor. It keeps you alive. Everything above the floor you're building yourself, out of whatever materials the institutions leave within reach. And the distance between the floor and solvency is where the cost of surviving gets converted, month by month, into the debt of having survived.
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Houston's proposed AC ordinance: A proposed Houston ordinance would require landlords to provide refrigerated air equipment in rental housing, with a committee presentation scheduled for July 28, 2026, testing whether "introduced" can become "enforced" before the next dangerous summer.
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Twenty states, twenty different rules: The LIHEAP Clearinghouse reports that 20 states now have hot-weather disconnection protections, but each state sets its own moratorium dates, arrears rules, and payment-plan terms, making the post-protection cliff a different shape everywhere.
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OSHA heat rule still proposed: The federal workplace heat standard remains in proposed-rule status with no final rule issued, leaving outdoor and warehouse workers governed by the general duty clause while indoor residential cooling failures continue to fall outside any federal occupational framework.
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Insurance premiums compound the squeeze: The Treasury Department's Federal Insurance Office found that homeowners in the highest-risk ZIP codes paid 82% more in premiums than those in the lowest-risk areas, a cost layer that compounds with rising utility bills for households already managing summer arrears.