UDP: $35 Million We Set Aside and Never Sent
Why For Seattle’s next project is a utility bills discount program few are championing.
If you live in Seattle and your household earns under a certain amount, the city will cut your electricity bill by 60% and your water and sewer bill by 50%. For a typical family, that is about $730 back in their pocket every year. The money is already budgeted. The program already exists. It is called the Utility Discount Program (UDP), and it has been on the books for decades.
Here is the problem. Roughly 82,000 households inside Seattle qualify, and by Seattle Public Utilities’ 2024 count only about 36,000 of them, or roughly 44%, are enrolled. Other figures run lower, closer to 36%. Either way, tens of thousands of families who qualify for this relief are not getting it, and the bills keep coming anyway. And it lands at a moment when utility bills are set to rise. Add it up and it comes to more than $35 million a year in help that Seattle has already set aside for working families and is simply failing to deliver.
After helping pass the Housing Opportunities legislation (aka HOP) and giving housing a real boost, that gap is where For Seattle is heading next.
What this actually is
Let us translate, because “Utility Discount Program” is the kind of name that makes one’s eyes glaze over. Seattle owns its power utility, Seattle City Light, and its water and sewer utility, Seattle Public Utilities. If your household income is at or below 70% of the state median, the city knocks a big chunk off both bills. Not a coupon, not a one-time rebate. An ongoing discount, every month, roughly $730 a year for a typical household.
The people this is built for are not abstractions. They are home care and grocery workers, retirees on fixed incomes, parents one rough month away from a hard choice. For a family deciding between the light bill and groceries, over $700 is not a rounding error. It is a tank of gas a month, a kid’s school activity, a little breathing room. And it is money the city has already decided these families should have.
It also matters more every year, not less. Utility bills are not holding still. Rates are climbing, and for many families faster than their paychecks. City Light is moving toward time-of-use pricing that could push some bills higher still. Every year this gap goes unfixed, it costs the families on the wrong side of it more.
Fewer than half enrolled is a delivery failure
So why are fewer than half the eligible households enrolled?
It is not a money problem. The discount is funded. It is a delivery problem, and the city has known about it for years. The barriers are not mysterious. The application is complicated. Proving your income means digging up pay stubs and benefit letters. When it is time to recertify, people fall off the rolls. The city has ramped up outreach lately, but you do not close a gap this big one folding table at a time, and outreach alone was never going to.
And UDP is not alone. The same kind of sign-up friction keeps eligible people out of other programs meant to help them. The half-price ORCA LIFT transit card for lower-income riders still has to be applied for with proof of income, the same hurdle that holds UDP back. And getting into one of the income-restricted apartments created by Seattle’s Multifamily Tax Exemption (which gives developers a tax break in exchange for those homes) is its own maze: the city’s own renter survey found the units hard to even locate, and 42% of renters called the application process difficult. When a benefit is hard to find or hard to claim, the help does not reach the people it was meant for.
This is the honest part, and it cuts both ways. Seattle has actually done real work here. The city built a one-stop tool called CiviForm that lets people apply for dozens of city programs in one place, and it has earned national recognition for it. But the Utility Discount Program, one of the largest monthly discounts the city offers and the rare one almost any low-income household qualifies for, whether or not they have kids, is still reaching fewer than half the households it is meant for. The city built an impressive machine, and the help still is not getting to most of the people who qualify. That is not a knock on the people who run our utilities, who do excellent work keeping the lights on and the water clean. It is a recognition that closing this particular gap has never been anyone's top priority, and so it keeps not closing. For Seattle intends to change that.
Where this fits: affordability and accountability
Everything For Seattle works on rolls up to four things we want this city to deliver. Affordability, so people can cover the basics. Livability, so shared spaces are safe and easy to move through. Vitality, so small businesses and neighborhoods thrive. And accountability, so the city follows through on what it promises and gets the most out of every public dollar.
UDP sits right at the corner of two of them. It is affordability in the most direct form there is, money back in a family’s pocket every month. And it is accountability in the most literal form there is: the city already decided to spend this money on these families. The only question left is whether it follows through and gets it to them.
That second part is why this one is ours, for two reasons.
First, it is help that reaches people directly, with no new bureaucracy to build. We are not asking the city to stand up a new program, hire a new department, or invent a new benefit. The benefit is already here. The dollars are already allocated. The only thing missing is delivery. That is a rare and unusually clean opportunity: real money to real families, just by making the city finish something it already started.
Second, few are championing it. Most issues at City Hall have an organized constituency behind them, a group whose job it is to show up, testify, and keep the pressure on. The 46,000 families missing out on this discount do not have that. They are busy working, raising kids, getting by. A program that quietly helps people, with no interest group behind it, is exactly the kind of thing that falls through the cracks year after year. Making sure the city follows through on the promises that no lobby is there to enforce is close to the whole reason For Seattle exists.
Other cities already cracked this
The best part is that we do not have to invent the solution. Other cities and states have already shown what works.
Los Angeles lets families sign up just by stating their income on the form, and checks a sample afterward, instead of demanding documents from everyone up front. That is the design behind its EZ-SAVE program. California goes a step further and auto-qualifies people who are already in programs like Medicaid or SNAP, on the logic that if you have already proven you are low-income to one government agency, you should not have to prove it again to your utility. Its CARE program reaches an estimated 80% or more of the households that qualify, compared with roughly 36 to 44% here. And in 2024, Massachusetts signed a single data-sharing agreement between its state benefits agency and its utilities, so people on SNAP or MassHealth now get their utility discount automatically, with no application at all.
The pattern across all of them is the same. When enrollment is automatic, take-up runs high. When it requires a separate application, take-up collapses. Seattle is sitting right where you would predict for a city that still makes families apply through an overly complex process.
What good looks like here
So here is what we will be pushing for, in plain terms:
Let people sign up by stating their income, with an audit on a sample of applications afterward, instead of forcing the paperwork up front.
Match data between the utilities and the state, so families already enrolled in Apple Health (Washington’s Medicaid health coverage), SNAP (federal food assistance, known here as Basic Food), or TANF (temporary cash help for low-income families with children) get the discount automatically, with the checks to keep it accurate.
Modernize outreach so it actually reaches the people who qualify.
Show people their savings. Put the discount front and center on the bill so every enrolled household can see the money the program is putting back in their pocket. When the benefit is visible, people know it is working, are more likely to stay enrolled, and more likely to tell a neighbor who qualifies.
Set a real enrollment goal, and require the utilities to report every year on how close they are to hitting it.
That last one is the follow-through piece, and it is the part we care about most. Right now there is no public enrollment target at all. The city's own budget math for the coming expansion assumes only about a third of eligible families will ever sign up. We think a city should aim higher than planning around its own gap. The point is not to pass something and declare victory.
And the timing is good. On June 2, Councilmember Dan Strauss introduced legislation to expand who qualifies for UDP, moving to a more generous income measure so that tens of thousands more low-income households become eligible. The bill, now before the Council and covered by PubliCola and The Seattle Medium, pairs that expansion with real enrollment work: the utilities are already scaling automatic sign-up through data-sharing partnerships with housing providers, using SNAP eligibility to help people stay enrolled, and ramping up community outreach. We support all of it. We have also written to Councilmember Strauss with two additions we think would finish the job. First, let people enroll by simply attesting to their income, with a back-end audit, so the application itself stops being the wall. Second, set a public enrollment goal and have the utilities report against it every year, because today the city tracks participation but holds itself to no target. The data-matching they have started should also be made comprehensive, so that everyone who qualifies gets reached, not just the households the utilities can already pull in. Expanding who qualifies without finishing the job on enrollment just leaves more families at the same wall.
The same goal, a different lever
A few days ago, the City Council passed the Housing Opportunities legislation 9 to 0. That was a real win, and a lot of you helped make it happen.
HOP and UDP are the same goal pursued with two different levers. HOP makes Seattle more affordable by making it possible to build more homes. UDP makes Seattle more affordable by delivering help the city already funds. One adds supply, the other fixes delivery, and both point at the same place: a city people can actually afford to live in.
They are also both tests of that fourth thing, accountability. HOP showed this city can finish something big when it decides to. UDP is the quieter test: can we be the kind of city that follows through on the smaller promises too, like the $35 million already set aside that just is not reaching people. That is the Seattle we are working toward, one where all of us can be proud of a local government that consistently delivers the basics it already promised.
If that is the kind of thing you want to be part of: