For decades now, Noella Kruse, who lives in an old schoolhouse near the closed Elmhurst High School, has had her gas turned off every spring and turned back on in the fall.

When she bought the house more than four decades ago it had only electric heat, which was expensive. So she had a single gas space heater installed, and it heated the bedrooms and a TV room during the winter.

About 30 years ago, at the suggestion of a meter reader, she started having the gas turned off when she didn’t need it, just to save a few dollars a month.

This fall, when Kruse, who is 93, went to have the gas turned back on, she and her son, Larry, were in for a surprise. NIPSCO wanted a $70 reconnect fee, plus a service fee of $11 a month, plus 7 percent sales tax, for the months when the gas was turned off.

The entire bill to turn the gas back on came to more than $120, her son said, and she hadn’t yet used a sniff of gas.

“Had we been told that if we shut it off we would be charged $70 to put it back on,” they wouldn’t have had it turned off, Larry Kruse said. “I could see if it had been shut off for non-payment, but that’s not why” it was turned off.

This all stems from a change in NIPSCO fees that was approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission a year ago. Some of the changes were supposed to save the average natural gas user about $7.50 a year, according to NIPSCO.

A NIPSCO spokesman said the company used to allow people to turn their gas off and turn it back on once a year for free. It was called a snowbird reconnection, and NIPSCO was the only gas utility in the state to do that, the company said. It also charged people a service fee based on the amount of gas they used, so if you used no gas, there was no service fee.

Now, all residential gas customers are charged a flat $11 a month plus sales tax regardless of how much gas they use, and if they turn the gas off, there is an automatic $70 minimum reconnection fee if the gas is turned back on within 10 months. NIPSCO officials said the changes were announced last year in the media and in customers’ utility bills.

The Kruses’ discontent isn’t unusual.

Squawking just as loud are small-business owners like Steve Ball, who owns the Java Bean Café on Broadway, a little coffeehouse with about 10 seats.

Ball says his shop has electric heat. The only gas he uses is for a water heater, which uses about $3 a month in gas. Every month, though, his bill includes a $32 service fee. He’s subsidizing larger users, he said.

NIPSCO disagrees, saying that before, larger users had been subsidizing the small users, who paid practically no service fees.

The service fee includes the cost of maintaining lines, maintaining a call center and paying for people in the field, including repair crews and meter readers, NIPSCO officials said.

One of the people Larry Kruse called when he found out about the charges his mother faced was Rep. Win Moses, D-Fort Wayne. Moses says he’s received other calls about the service fees.

“It defies legal reasoning,” Moses said.

“Maximize income,” Moses said. “Expect no mercy. It will continue until the Utility Regulatory Commission does something.”

As for legislative possibilities, this is the sort of topic that will never come before the legislature, Moses said. It is the purview of the IURC.

In Kruse’s case, though, there was a little mercy. Because the policies are relatively new, the company said, customers wanting their gas turned off temporarily are supposed to be told there will be a reconnect fee and the monthly service fees.

In Kruse’s case, it was determined they weren’t adequately notified when they called to get their gas shut off, so they’re getting a refund.