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Public Administration
Case Study: The Cinergy Energy Retrofit Project
An investigation into the mechanics of City of Toronto contract administration
This research project began in 2005, is ongoing, and will probably continue for quite some time as resources allow.
posted January 20, 2009
Mandate
One of the key aspects of Municipal governance is program administration. As a research organization, CELOS is interested in the functionality of public administration, and its effect on public space.
In 2004 CELOS became aware of a $10M contract that had been let to Cinergy Canada, to implement energy savings in Arenas (including outdoor rinks) under Toronto's Energy Retrofit Program. CELOS began accumulating information about it. Now that the implementation phase of the contract is over, we are interested in seeing how it went. By that we mean we are interested in investigating how the mechanics of the contract were implemented.
Fortunately, this should be straightforward, as there are two relatively precise documents governing the implementation of this contract. At the same time there is a substantial amount of money involved and therefore responsibility involved. These realities make the project an ideal candidate for investigation. The two documents are
One of the key Energy Retrofit Program requirements is that retrofits be financed out of energy savings over no more than a ten year period. We therefore propose to pay particular attention to the monitoring and verification of this requirement by City administrators.
At core, we are interested in the capacity of City administrators to pursue due diligence in this type of circumstance - the oversight of a complex contract. We hope to apply insights from this investigation to the formulation of subsequent research.
Objectives
To be more specific, we propose to
list the contractual and administrative obligations undertaken by Cinergy and Toronto's Parks Forestry and Recreation department, particularly in the form of generation and review of program reports
evaluate the compliance of the City and Cinergy by obtaining these reports, and comparing report contents to report requirements.
identify verifiable contents of these reports (energy usage, energy costs, and energy cost savings), and go through the exercise of obtaining sufficient documentation to verify those contents
analyze and interpret the results, within the confines of the available data
report the results of our investigation on the CELOS website (celos.ca) for public review and discussion
Methods
There are a number of challenges in conducting this research.
The material is technical
The source data material is not readily available, and at times poorly defined. Instead material must typically be assembled through laborious and iterative interactions with City personnel, through email requests and the more formal Access to Information requests. These formal requests are not allowed to be objective-driven (ie attempts at collaboration are not accepted), but rather must refer to requests for specifically identified or described "records".
Source data material often has implicit precursors, which are difficult to identify and obtain.
To date, CELOS has obtained source data through a survey of Toronto website material (see review), many email requests, Access to Information Requests, and one formal appeal to the Province of Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. This information has been accumulated in paper folders, stacking about 4 inches high. The data is organized into four dossiers:
Correspondence
Working notes and documents
Specification documents
Implementation documents
Most of the information is general or descriptive in nature, and not specifically helpful to our purpose - there is a lot of "noise".
Our method for this stage of the research is to
review the assembled material
create a prototype series of spreadsheets to collect and derive concrete numerical measurements (see the prototype - xls document)