It's costing more to cool our homes this summer.

This year, state energy regulators approved rate hikes for urban and rural Kentuckians, though a federal program has for decades to help low income households pay those utility bills.

And Eastern Kentucky lawmaker says it's just a Band-Aid approach.

Our Jeanne LaFleur explains.

Congress created the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or Lihe, in the 1980s.

This fiscal year alone, it's offered nearly $50 million to keep the electricity on for hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians.

Because Lihe funds are appropriated by Congress every October, and we're always subject to whether they want to increase or decrease or not fund at all.

There has been some folks that would like to defund the program, but we're going to go through here, go ahead and file as though we will be receiving those funds.

President Donald Trump wants to eliminate that funding as he proposed last year.

Congress did it, pulled the program in 2025, increasing overall funding.

But it looks like on slide three, the current proposed presidential budget would be eliminating this program.

So this is more of a statement of making sure that we are doing everything we can as a as legislators to reach out to those who are part of our congressional delegation to look out for these tens of thousands of Kentucky households who are benefiting from keeping their power on on the coldest days, on the hottest days.

This Eastern Kentucky Republican values, the program, but says one time seasonal assistance is not a solution for his region.

You go a maximum of $400 the next month.

You don't come back and give another $400.

The cut off.

So we need to understand that this is just a Band-Aid for a certain period of time, not for a season.

I know our goal as a committee is to try to bring costs down and look at, and we know we're looking at coal regeneration, bringing it back, whatever we can do to reduce the cost because, we're just talking about helping a few, and there's a mass that needs help.

Lawmakers offered these comments last week at a natural resources meeting in Frankfort.

The Public Service Commission, the state utilities regulator, testified Thursday, saying it considers the cost to residential customers when approving utilities request to power data centers.

When we had a couple of a number of cryptocurrency or, and crypto mining, users come in and they weren't using anywhere close to this, but, particularly the commission actually denied a couple of those applications because they looked at him and said, no, this is this has the potential of, some costs being borne by the existing customers rather than the cause or so.

Yes, we do have the power currently to disapprove a special contract that's brought before us, and we have done it at least a couple times since I've been here for projects that were brought to us that we did not think we're good for right payers.

State lawmakers did not pass data center ratepayer protections this year.

Reporting from the Kentucky Lantern shows utilities favored oversight from the PSC rather than statewide legislation.

For Kentucky edition, I'm June Leffler.