The Uptown paper of record has unwittingly stumbled into an on-going local scandal, albeit via a sack-cloth and ashes, shared sacrifice routine worthy of the sweater-wearing peanut farmer from Georgia.
Here’s the deal, if we are well and truly serious about more energy efficient facilities management for our public buildings then we’ll have new performance contracting agreements in place by the end of the week.
The concept is simple and used all over the country — except Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Entities contract with an energy services company to find and implement energy savings. The company gets paid in relation to what they save the building owner. If the savings do not match projections, the contractor takes the hit.
Seems like a no-brainer until you realize it would mean that our local bureaucrats would have to give up control of some aspects of facilities management and commit to playing fair-and-square with costs and expenses over a number of years. Can’t have that, can we? Nope.
In fact, Mecklenburg County officials no too long ago shot down any consideration of performance contracting for energy savings after a single meeting with a contractor. The complaint was that company would “make money” out of the arrangement. And that was that.
It shouldn’t be. We can futz with thermostats a few degrees here and there, feel all smug and oh so progressive, delude ourselves into thinking We Made a Difference or — demand that our tax dollars are used wisely and to maximize energy efficiency in all the millions of square feet of public buildings we heat and cool each year.
This being Charlotte, can you guess which one it will be?
