Our letter to the Arizona Corporation Commission
Written to support the investigation started at the request of the Arizona Attorney General. We have reason for skepticism about the ACC’s commitment.
From: Adam Korman & Jonathan Korman [the sons of Kate Korman]
To: Arizona Corporation Commission
Cc: Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes
Date: 9 May 2025
Subject: Investigation into APS and Kate Korman’s untimely death
[via email]
Dear Commissioners,
As you investigate the role of APS in our mother’s death, we’d like to provide some background that we think will be helpful. We also have a number of questions that we think are critical to address and thoughts on changes to the rules and regulation which could save the lives of your constituents in the future.
Based on what we know about our mother, her finances, and the bills and communications from APS, it seems clear that the reason she fell behind on her bill, had her power disconnected, and ultimately died as result, was not that she needed financial assistance, but because she likely did not even realize she was so far behind.
There has been a lot of focus in the media on our mother’s failure to pay her bill as the reason she was disconnected, but not much attempt to understand why that happened. Whether financial assistance programs were offered to her, and whether those programs are adequate to address the problems of people facing financial hardship are valuable and important to address at large. But for our mom, her ability to pay was not the problem. What happened in our mother’s case was a different sort of failure of systems, policies, and procedures that resulted in her untimely death.
Reviewing our mom’s email account, it’s clear that over the years she read very few of the emails she ever received from APS. As someone whose bill was on autopay, evidently since 2007 when she first moved to Arizona, she had no reason to carefully monitor those messages.
The Timeline
We feel certain that our mother did not choose to leave her electric bill unpaid starting after January 2024. Her other bills were paid, and she could afford to pay her balance to APS. The unfortunate chain of failures began almost a year earlier, in June 2023. At that time, her checking account was overdrawn when APS tried to pull her payment two months in a row: June & July of 2023.
She had sufficient funds in a separate retirement account. Direct deposits from Social Security and her retirement account were routinely made every month just after her APS bill was drawn. We believe that she was short that month due to some unexpected expense, and did not realize what had happened. Had she known that she was going to miss her electric bill, we are sure she would have transferred money from her retirement account to cover it.
After the two failed payments in summer 2023, APS turned off autopay on her account. The primary method used by APS to inform her of this and her mounting unpaid balance was her monthly paperless bill. Like most paperless billing, with APS that meant she got email notifications with subject lines like “Your bill is ready to view” and few additional details in the email itself.
This initially happened during the moratorium on disconnects in the summer of 2023, but APS didn’t take action to disconnect her power until January 2024, almost 3 months after that summer’s moratorium ended. Her APS bills in August, September, October, November, and December all included large, bold callouts about the missed payments and provided options for assistance. On her December 22, 2024 bill, it finally mentioned a planned date for disconnection: on or after Jan 9, 2024. We don’t know what eventually caught her attention, but it did register for her in time: on Dec 28, 2023 she wrote a check for $1,126.88 to APS to pay off the balance that had accumulated since June. That check cleared on January 5, 2024 and she was caught up at that point.
But immediately after writing that check, she was missing payments again. We imagine that after getting her account back into good standing, she assumed that autopay would resume. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Instead, her February, March, and April 2024 bills went unpaid before her power was turned off on May 13, 2024, with temperatures approaching 100º.
“10 Contact Attempts”
Although APS has gone out of its way to highlight that they made 10 attempts to reach our mom about her overdue bills in 2024, it’s clear those attempts were wholly inadequate. If they worked, she might still be alive. Here’s what those failed attempts included:
Four routine emails (Jan, Feb, March, and April of 2024) with the subject “Your APS bill is ready to view.” There’s nothing in the subject or body of these emails that mention any problem or that she was behind on payments. She would have had to click through the email, sign on to her online account, and review her bills to even know there was an unpaid balance.
An email on 4/30/24 with the subject "Past-due notice — Please make a payment today." This was the first indication of a problem, in an unread email, just two weeks before cutting the power..
An autodialed phone call on 5/1/24 to a (202) area code cell phone number that she stopped using in 2007 (when she moved to Arizona). Calling that number today goes straight to a generic pre-recorded message without ringing and no ability to leave a voicemail.
A door hanger supposedly left at her home on 5/8/24. Her friends/neighbors did not mention seeing this when they checked on her in the days after the power was cut, and we did not find this in her home after she died.
An email on 5/8/24 with the subject "Your electric service is scheduled to be disconnected” and the body of the message mentions the door hanger.
An email on 5/9/24 with the subject "Your service is scheduled to be disconnected.” The body of the message says it’s the final notice.
An email sent the day after the power was cut, on 5/14, with the subject "Your APS service has been disconnected.”
That’s 8 unread emails (including one after the power was cut), a phone call to a bad number, and a door hanger (that we have no idea if she received) 5 days before the disconnect.
We know the tragic outcome. Sometime in the days after the power was cut on May 13, 2024, with temperatures soaring into the high 90s and 100s, she died, literally baking in her home. If she had A/C, she would not have died when she did in the way that she did.
Questions
This all brings to mind many questions that we expect you to investigate.
Why is it that in 2023 APS allowed for 7 missed payments before scheduling a shut off, but in 2024, power was cut after just 3 missed payments? They could have scheduled a disconnect soon after the moratorium was lifted in 2023, but they didn’t. Why didn’t they allow for a similar amount of time the second time she fell behind?
Looking at the bills themselves, the first time she missed payments in 2023, there were 5 months of bills with bold callouts calling attention to her mounting balance, her options, and the actions APS would take. In 2024, there was just one bill with a similar bold callout that she was emailed about only 2 weeks before her power was disconnected. Again, why the discrepancy in policy and procedures?
Apparently of its own volition, APS decided to begin their moratorium on disconnects on May 16, 2024 — two weeks earlier than they were required and just 3 days after our mom was disconnected. This indicates that APS knew full well a date-based moratorium is dangerous, shouldn’t be followed, and ought to change. Who prompted that change? What are the circumstances that led to that decision? Most customers probably immediately contact the power company after their power is shut off, but our mom did not. We suspect the heat likely overcame her quickly.
Something happened at APS in May 2024. What prompted them to move up the moratorium date in 2024? Were people inside the company aware of our mother’s case? Did they suspect that something was wrong? Were they worried that she might have died? Did that inspire concern that the same might happen to others if they continued disconnecting people in 100º weather? What internal communications were there about all of this?
Change the Rules
It is past time to change the rules and processes. There’s no reason our mom should have died last year. And there’s no reason more people should continue to die because their utilities are turned off.
Temp-based moratoriums. We all know that heat kills, and cutting off people’s power when the temps are high has killed and will continue to kill. Through its own behavior in 2024, by deciding to start their moratorium early, APS has effectively admitted that a date-based moratorium on disconnects is inadequate. They know that this policy kills. But our mother’s death demonstrates that we cannot leave it up to the utilities to decide when to start the moratorium. Mandate a temperature-based moratorium on disconnecting electricity.
More consistent policies and procedures. A reasonable person who experienced what our mom did the first time she fell behind on payments would come away with an expectation about what might happen in the future. That first time, she was 7 months behind before a disconnect was scheduled and APS was sent a long series of communications highlighting her situation over a period of several months. The second time she fell behind, it all happened much faster. The first communication they sent specifically indicating a problem was sent just 2 weeks before the power was cut. We find that obviously unacceptable. Arizona must require clear and consistent policies and procedures for utility disconnection.
More robust contact requirements. People rely on autopay and paperless billing as great conveniences, but these passive tools create challenges when something needs attention. With the growing volume of both routine and junk communication we all get via email, phone calls, and even physically at our home, it’s hard not to tune out most of it as noise. That combination means that when something does go wrong (as when our mother’s payments failed) it is hard to register whether a message gets through. Our mother demonstrates how people may not know they have a problem at all until they have their service disconnected. That may be merely an inconvenience with a service like cable TV, but with electricity in Arizona, disconnected service is life-threatening. We don’t pretend to have a complete answer, but it seems obvious that as a vital utility, electricity providers must not disconnect people without positive confirmation that they have made contact with a customer and communicated to them that they face disconnection. That could be someone on their own staff documenting a direct contact, or done in coordination with an outside agency (local law enforcement) who could perform a wellness check.
Routine investigations of heat deaths. At the time of our mother’s death, it did not occur to us that it reflected a recurring pattern emergent from policy and process decisions made in the light of known challenges. We only discovered this and started to speak out because of the efforts of diligent journalists. We cannot guess how many other people have suffered similar tragedies without becoming aware of their connection to larger processes as we have. It should not fall to grieving families to act as advocates. People reasonably expect that any system with life-and-death stakes makes an ongoing effort to keep people safe and this is already within the purview and mandate of the ACC. We need a system which would have automatically triggered this investigation, rather than one that waits for a grieving family to demand it.
Other creative solutions. There are surely other novel ways to help keep people alive. Maybe before final disconnection there’s a way to cycle the power on and off so that A/C can continue to provide some cooling, but create enough of an inconvenience to prompt action. Maybe there are processes or automated systems to put in place to validate contact information periodically. If APS had her current phone number, they might have reached our mom. Maybe APS and/or the ACC could do more proactive outreach within the community — especially within retirement communities like Sun City West, where our mom lived — to actively review accounts with customers and set up text alerts, add alternate contacts on the account in case of emergency, and teach people to be on the lookout for door hangers so they can check in on their friends and neighbors.
If you start from a position of acknowledging that the current rules don’t do enough, that you can and should try to save more lives, we feel confident that you can find solutions which protect people.
Forget for a moment all of the other details about our mom’s case. Regardless of how and why she was behind on her electric bill, it was approaching 100º when APS shut off her power. They knew heat kills. You know heat kills. Change the rules. Please don’t let more families suffer the same tragedy as ours.
If there’s any way we can be of further assistance in your investigation, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Thank you,
Adam Korman & Jonathan Korman
