08/09 Capital budget - Schools - renovation (2/3)

This is the second post on the schools' renovation capital budget. The first post is here.The topics covered in this post are Energy Savings Improvements:Indoor Air Quality Issues:District-wide Window Replacement:
The Council met tonight with Superintendent Florio, BOE member Dixon, BOE member Massey and Asst. Superintendent Paul Calaluce.

I asked how much of their operating budget gets allocated to capital projects on an annual basis. (More specifically, I wanted to know which of those projects offered energy efficiency improvements.) I didn't write down any particular projects, but the Supt. acknowledged that portions of the operating budget do get shifted to capital projects at times.

But why does that matter?

Simple... if you add up all the energy efficiency numbers in Year One of the capital budget, you get between $2.5 and $3.0 million. And if you add the following four years, you get in excess of an additional $2 million. So that's $4,000,000,000 to $5,000,000 in energy-related improvements that could be made to the schools today. And we've got another $10,000,000 in energy-related improvements proposed for the sewers... among other energy-related projects. And I suspect that much of these projects could be financed using performance contracts.

But despite assurances from a year ago, nothing has happened in relation to seriously considering performance contracting.

Why?

to be continued...

Tim White