Government Operations committee  No, because one of our large sectors is social housing, and another very large sector is school boards, so I would say that those two would be very large portions of our portfolio. The federal projects would probably be in the order of magnitude of 10% of our portfolio for NRC an

Government Operations committee  I'll add to that just the agency problem. The individual or the group that saves the operating cost is not necessarily the group spending the capital or watching the capital. They don't get together, and that's a problem. Follow the money, and the savings may not get over to pay

Government Operations committee  We can all improve. Certainly, working with the federal government has been a worthwhile exercise. As I said in my remarks, I think the projects were successful, they were meaningful, and the results are significant. I think that says a lot about the projects. It's a great oppo

Government Operations committee  I'm not sure if “irritating” is the word I'd go with.

Government Operations committee  There's lots to be done, a lot of opportunity. Let's get going; it should be done faster. Again, put the right people in the right place with the right objectives. Give them a clear message. Recognize them and it will happen. I think that's a great message. I think a lot of emplo

Government Operations committee  I think their discussion with the client who has retained them is becoming a lot more specific about the objectives of the design. And I wrote down the integrated designs as well; that's got to be critical. So we need to take action with the clients up front and give them that sa

Government Operations committee  In the process that's used, the federal buildings initiative is a completely open-book process. So the performance fee that you're referring to and the financing are shown as separate line items. So anybody entertaining that kind of project would know to the penny what those cost

Government Operations committee  Well, the individual energy service companies bring the various financial institutions to the table as part of their offering. I have to tell you, there's not an overabundance of this business out there. I'm talking about the performance contracting business with the federal gove

Government Operations committee  The only thing I would add is that people generally want to know where they stand and how they are doing. So if you have a benchmarking system in place, or if you can just do it within your own portfolio to find out if they're all consistent or if you have a couple of buildings t

Government Operations committee  Sure. The essence of the performance contract is the savings, that is, what savings can be achieved? From there, it really is up to the client in terms of how long they want to have that annual savings stream focused on paying back the capital, the principal, and the interest. If

Government Operations committee  As a quick comment, if we paid the same price for energy that they pay, we'd be getting there too.

Government Operations committee  When I was listening to your question, the first thing that came to my mind was that there are many departments that have many different buildings in their portfolio, or buildings that they occupy, whether it's a portion of a building or the entire building. The first step is to

Government Operations committee  Energy performance contracting in those kinds of situations becomes more complicated—there's no way around it—because now you have yet another contract in place: the lease. I think you've had a briefing on green leases. By adopting those, by being forthright and specific about w

Government Operations committee  That's where it needs to go, as well. To accomplish some of that facility renewal I referred to, that infrastructure renewal, you're going to have to look at broadening the term. By using that energy savings, over a longer period of time, to pay for more capital investment to ma

Government Operations committee  Personally, I am not familiar with that. It's something else I could look into, but I'm not familiar with any of those examples.