LEWISTON – Senior citizens would get financial help upgrading their furnaces, according to a plan outlined for city councilors Tuesday.

The city would work with Community Concepts Inc. to perform energy audits for area seniors and help pay for more efficient heating systems, City Administrator James Bennett said. Lower income seniors would get priority help, but the plan is to extend the program to all of the city’s seniors.

“These are people that have worked all of their life, and they haven’t asked for much back,” Bennett said. “You could say to them, ‘Don’t you think you deserve a little help just this one time?'”

Bennett outlined a slate of programs designed to help residents stay warm this winter. It included money for landlords to upgrade their heating systems and a program similar to Auburn Mayor John Jenkins’ Neighbors Keepers.

Bennett said Lewiston needs neighbors to keep track of each other this winter, but he didn’t think the city itself was prepared to manage the program.

“I’m asking for community and social groups to really take the lead on this – churches, social groups, Scouts,” Bennett said. “They are the ones that would be best able to address this.”

Mayor Jenkins has proposed a similar program, Neighbors Keepers. It calls for registered volunteers, vetted by the city, to check in on their neighbors throughout the winter.

Councilors liked Bennett’s proposals, and he said he would work to get the programs back to councilors for a vote as quickly as possible.

“I think we’re a little under the gun here because we got a later start, about 30 or 40 days later than we expected,” Bennett said. “But I think taking that time allowed us to develop some pretty good programs.”

Most of the programs would rely on partnerships with Community Concepts and money from the city’s Community Development Block Grant budget, federal money the city has received since 1974.

In one part of the plan, the city would give landlords loans to fix old or inefficient heating systems. Interest rates would be between 2 and 4 percent, and the city would structure the payments so they wouldn’t exceed the expected energy savings.

The landlord program would rely on $250,000 in revolving loans from the city’s block grant program, and the city’s share of funding for senior citizens would use $225,000 in block grant money redirected from a downtown housing program.

The city would also act as a clearinghouse for single-family homeowners who don’t qualify for other help.