Porter Ranch: Residents say SoCal Gas is behind on relocation payments

Some residents who fled their homes  in the wake of the four-month natural gas leak near Porter Ranch say Southern California Gas Company has delayed paying all reimbursements for food, mileage and housing the residents say they were promised.

An official with SoCal Gas said the company is up to date paying all valid claims and any outstanding claims are those needing added documentation from residents.

"Anybody who's not been paid at this point, we have questions that we are trying to resolve in terms of their specific reimbursement situation," said Gillian Wright, SoCal Gas vice president for customer service.

Porter Ranch resident Dimitri Lazdam was so concerned about his mounting credit card balances for hotel and meal expenses that he posted a survey on a Facebook group asking Porter Ranch families to share their experiences. By Monday morning, about 100 people had responded, claiming to be owed a total of $917,000.

Wright said SoCal Gas has paid more than 29,000 claims totaling more than $58 million  to relocated families for food, gasoline and housing.

"There is money flowing out every day," she said. The company has about 100 people working on processing claims.

More than 4,000 checks mailed on Friday would bring the company up to date for all claims that were correctly documented, Wright said. However, there were a number of claims for hotels, meals and mileage expenses that had not yet been paid, she said. Those claims lacked documentation or were unclear for some other reason. Wright did not know the dollar amount of those outstanding claims.

Lazdam's survey contains anecdotal information because those who respond are most likely to be those unhappy with SoCal Gas' payments, Lazdam concedes.

Of his 100 respondents, unpaid claims averaged more than $9,000 per household. One-third of the respondents had received no checks at all, he said. He also had reports of three checks that were returned for insufficient funds.

"Some people feel betrayed by SoCal Gas," Lazdam said. "Some people had to come back to their homes, not because they are safe, but because they couldn't financially sustain paying out of pocket until the gas company pays them."

Wright said the company had put stop payments on checks that it issued in error and on checks that it later realized had improper documentation or were sent to the wrong person, Wright said.  

She said the task of calculating the housing and meals expenses was complicated by the multiple moves that some families had made over the past few months. Some households moved two or more times, and some families had members living in Porter Ranch homes while others stayed in hotels or short-term rentals.

Los Angeles County Health Department ordered SoCal Gas to pay for the relocations in mid-November, and since then, more than 8,000 families had moved out for some period of time over the course of the leak which was discovered in late October and plugged in mid-Feburary.

Responding to the county order, SoCal Gas  promised to pay up to $250 per day for hotel stays or short term home rentals. It also paid $45 per day per person for meals and 57.5  cents per mile for commuting between the alternate homes, work or school.

Some families were placed in hotels and rental homes by relocation companies working on behalf of SoCal Gas. But other residents, including Lazdam, chose their own hotels or rental homes and have been fronting the expenses themselves.

SoCal Gas had stated it would cover those self-relocating households' expenses as well, as long as they fell within its reimbursement program limits. Self-relocating families are the ones that are out the most money, Lazdam said.

He didn't want to disclose his own out-of-pocket amount, but said the family with the highest expense in his survey was owed $55,000.

A few weeks after the leak was declared plugged, SoCal Gas won a court order to stop paying alternative housing costs. However, county officials appealed. They wanted  more time to test in-home air quality. Returning residents have reported illnesses like nausea, nosebleeds and rashes. Just over 4,000 families remain in alternate housing pending the outcome of the county's appeal.

SoCal Gas regularly puts out press releases describing the thousands of checks it mails to displaced residents.

But the company has not disclosed, on an ongoing basis, how much the paid and unpaid claims are adding up to or how lengthy the payment delays are, said Paula Cracium, who chairs the Porter Ranch Community Advisory Committee. The committee is a SoCal Gas-funded group of homeowner organizations and other stakeholders that acts as an independent clearinghouse for gas leak information.

"I certainly hear more often than I should that people are out literally tens of thousands on their credit card and now they are at risk for problems with their credit," Cracium said.

She has asked Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer and Councilman Mitchell Englander to seek a list of claims SoCal Gas has not yet paid and the reasons for the late payments.  She wants an independent administrator to oversee the payments process.

"There's just an enormous amount of money that people continue to put on their cards for housing and other expenses that don't seem to be getting reimbursed quickly," Cracium said.

SoCal Gas had stated in court documents that it was spending about $2 million a day on hotels, rentals and meal allowances  for  displaced residents. It  has told its shareholders that it had more than $1 billion in insurance coverage for the gas leak incident.

Cracium said the company can, and should, pay up.

"Holding that amount of money certainly for any length of time would certainly be a benefit to the gas company," she said. "We want to make sure that there's not anything stalling those payments coming back to our stakeholders.