Brian Cummins · New legislation introduced for LED Lighting Procurement for City of Cleveland

June 7th, 2010

A new ordinance will be introduced this evening to Cleveland City Council that would authorize the Administration to enter into a 10-year requirement contract for LED lighting products.

A PDF version of the new ordinance can be downloaded here:
http://realneo.us/system/files/Ord._829-10_-_Mayor_Jackson__Req_K_LEDs.pdf

The new legislation requires that the procurement go through a competitive bidding process but most all of the other terms from the previous ordinance remain the same.

I’ll be opposing the ordinance for the same reasons I opposed the previous, namely:

1)  A ten-year contract would not benefit the City of Cleveland in fulfilling our LED lighting needs. The status of LED lighting technology and industry experts opinion indicates that it would be un-wise to enter into such a long-term contract with products and a technology that is changing so rapidly.

2)  Bundling and committing to all four products (traffic, street, bulb and tube replacement lighting) The status of LED lighting technology and industry experts opinion indicates that only two (street and traffic light replacements) of the four products listed are recommended for full replacement procurement currently.There are multiple statements from the Department of Energy and other industry sources that warn municipalities and other potential customers of LED lighting that tube and bulb replacement lighting has not been sufficiently tested and proven to be economically sound investments.

3)  Un-substantiated claims that the City’s purchasing power can be leveraged to attract 350 jobs in assembly, manufacturing and research and development jobs within 5-years. There have been offers by other companies, in addition to Sunpu-Opto to meet these conditions, but other well known companies in the industry make more modest offers of 100 or so assembly jobs.

It should be pointed out that manufacturing employee wages in locations such as China are below $1.00 per hour as compared to rates in the U.S. that average $16.00 – 17.00.

4)  Lack of quality requirements in the new ordinance. Like the old ordinance, there are no specific quality specifications listed in the ordinance.  The Administration incorrectly states in the ordinance in Section 1.1. “comply with UL and LM 79 testing prior ro being furnished to the City;”.  Although there are compliance ratings that need to be achieved for a UL rating (this is for safety), LM 79 is a methodology for testing performance measures and does not require compliance but only provides performance data based on industry standard testing procedures and measurements.

A more adequate requirement for minimum performance requirements would be Energy Star certification.In terms of Energy Star ratings, the contract would only require the contractor to “develop LED products that meet Energy Star Standards” and to “actively work toward achieving an Energy Standard Rating for those products”, but there is never a requirement to use Energy Star rating requirements as quality standards to procure the product and no time-certain requirement to reach Energy Star standards.  A company could ostensibly be “actively pursuing” Energy Star ratings and consistently not receiving them for the entire 10-years.

5)  Preference for a process that would require competitive bidding, but for single product procurement beginning with street lights and traffic lights. Tubes and bulb replacement procurement would follow the market availability of tested certified products.

6)  Preference for a process that would utilize our regional Economic Development organizations such as Nortech’s Advanced Energy Cluster (as a model); Team Neo, and JumpStart; as well as participation in the Department of Energy’s Solid State Street Lighting Consortium.  I disagree with the Administration’s approach to trying to lure jobs to Cleveland from a single company and not seek out existing companies in our region and State that are involved in providing LED products, i.e., General Electric (GE) and Green Mill Global/Fawoo/Fawoo North Tech America.

Also, it should be pointed out that GE already employs workers in our region in Executive, R&D (Technology, Design & Engineering) and manufacturing jobs; They also have a World headquarters in our region with 700 employees and a $60 million payroll.

Brian J. Cummins
Councilman, Ward 14
Cleveland City Council
City Hall, Room 220
601 Lakeside Avenue
Cleveland, OH 44114
216-664-4238 office
bcummins[at]clevelandcitycouncil.org

ref:

Initial post on previous ordinance:
http://www.brewedfreshdaily.com/2010/cleveland%e2%80%99s-led-lighting-plan-bold-but-sensible

Cleveland City Council set to approve sale of Convention Center to Cuyahoga County on Monday
By Mark Gillispie, The Plain Dealer, June 04, 2010 http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/06/cleveland_city_council_set_to.html

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2 Responses to “New legislation introduced for LED Lighting Procurement for City of Cleveland”

  1. JS Says:
    June 8th, 2010 at 7:58 am

    Ten year contract — or ten year process for awarding a contract? The latter would be more in line with Cleveland-as-Usual.

    Say what you will, if sound business was slammed through at the rate of Sunpu-Opto, we wouldn’t need to talk about economic development. (Because we’d be doing economic development …and I wish I didn’t need to point that out).

  2. Ed Morrison Says:
    June 13th, 2010 at 9:46 am

    Brian:

    Thank you for your leadership on this important issue. The Jackson Administration can’t seem to get it right. I’m not quite clear what the rush is all about. This is a fast evolving market, and the Department of Energy has created a network of leading municipalities to sort out opportunities as they emerge.

    The incompetence of the Sunpu Opto deal underscores the many weaknesses within the administration in their economic development strategy.

    Rather than rush through with yet another ill-conceived ordinance, Cleveland’s business and foundation leaders should insist on conducting an after action review to learn from the mistakes that were made.

    In addition, the Sunpu Opto deal raises significant questions about Cleveland’s relationship with Peter Tien and the Princeton Environmental Group.