Climate Action Plan Grant Team

This page will serve as a reference site for the 7 NWEAC municipal partners awarded the $279,800 NYSERDA RFP10 Energy Management Personnel grant to develop greenhouse gas (GHG) and climate action plans (CAPs): A.K.A: “Joint Municipal Sustainability Services”

Project Notes (most recent at top)

[12 November 2010] Download draft contracts here.

[2 November 2010] We have announced the winning vendor team for the joint Municipal Sustainability Services
Press Release:
Consortium team awards joint municipal sustainability services contract for $279,000.

[Croton-on-Hudson, November 2, 2010] Led by Croton-on-Hudson, the Northern Westchester Energy Action Consortium’s project team for joint municipal sustainability services has awarded the contract for $279,800 to the vendor team of Ecology and Environment, Inc.
and

Blue Springs Energy, LLC. The seven municipalities who will receive assistance with greenhouse gas inventories and climate action plans under a federally funded NYSERDA/ARRA grant include Bedford, Cortlandt, Croton-on-Hudson, North Salem, Peekskill, Pound Ridge, and Somers.

The funding for this work derives from a grant awarded to the Consortium under the competitive federal Energy Efficiency Community Block Grant program administered by the New York State Energy Research Development Authority, under its RFP10 program for Energy Management Personnel. Several individual Westchester municipalities landed grant assistance under this program. But this Croton-led grant is the largest joint effort in which diverse communities share the costs and benefits of pooling resources to identify and work with a vendor team to provide a similar scope of work. The seven municipalities have a combined population of 121, 000, representing over half of the entire consortium’s residents.
This work will establish baselines for current energy-related consumption patterns in each community and use those facts to tailor specific recommendations for each community on ways to reduce future energy-related expenses. The work will be completed by December 2011. …
Read the whole press release.

[1 October 2010] We have submitted our RFP to the five final bidders:

Request for Proposals for Sustainability Services for Seven Municipalities in the Northern Westchester Energy Action Consortium

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SECTION 1: INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL CONDITIONS

1.1 The Northern Westchester Energy Action Consortium (NWEAC; www.nweac.org ), a group of 13 municipal governments, seeks a single contractor, or contractor team working under a single project manager, to perform greenhouse gas inventories (GHGs) and Climate Action Plans (CAPs) for 7 of its member communities (regional partners). A listing of the partners and each partner’s budget limits may be found at Section 4.

Descriptions of specific tasks and sub-tasks may be found in the Scope of Work (SOW) in Section 3.

All work must be completed within the stated budgetary limits and within 12 months of signing an agreement for the stated work. The winning bidder will be expected to comply with all federal, state, and local contractual requirements, as delineated in this Request for Proposal (RFP) and its attachments, including a Waste Management Plan, as found in the appendices.

Bidders must respond with emailed proposals to the addresses shown below no later than 5 PM Friday, October 15, 2010.

Proposals will then be reviewed with an expected choice of a winning bidder by 6 PM Monday, November 1, 2010.

…

To download full RFP, follow this link.

# # #

[23 September 2010] RFP steps ahead.
Our NYSERDA Agreement (#19534) for our RFP10 Project (#233) has been executed. Yippee! We have narrowed the potential bidders down from 11 to 5, using a written set of criterion (see .pdf and .doc versions at bottom). The steps in our procurement process are as follows:

Process
of Vendor Procurement

28 March 2010

RFP10 Awards announced

22 April 2010

The Village/Consortium
project team holds its kick-off meeting to discuss process and dates for
vendor selection.

May-June 2010

The project team compiles
a scope of work and project description in preparation for issuing a request
for qualifications (RFQ).

1 July 2010

The RFQ is announced via
the Village website and submitted to the potential list of vendors compiled
by the project team. As word gets out, the Village receives about two dozen
inquiries about the RFQ.

2 August 2010

The responses to the RFQ
are due, with the Village receiving 11 submissions of statements of
qualifications.

August 2010

The project team begins
examining the qualifications submissions. Review of the RFQ responses
included having each statement of qualification read by at least four team
members. Each sub-team was assigned at two and no more than 3 sets of
qualifications to review. Reviewers used a written set of criterion
(attached) to assess each vendor’s qualification submission. The criteria
mirrored the information we had requested in the RFQ. Each of sub-teams rank
ordered their set as high or medium to low fit.

10 Sept 2010

The whole project team met
in person to compare reviews across all 11 submissions: six were eliminated
as not suitable in scope or scale and five vendors were selected as the best
potential fit. The project team
leader notified the 6
non-finalists and 5 finalists of the decisions in writing.

17 Sept 2010

The project team met to
continue to refine and complete the scope of work across the 7
municipalities, as well define the process for issuing the complete RFP to
the five vendors and the final selection of a vendor or vendor team.

22 Sept 2010.

Project Team supplies
Croton (Lindsay with CC to Leo and Susan) with all remaining inputs to the
scope of work and surrounding RFP;

24 Sept 2010

Croton send draft complete
RFP, including scope of work for 7 partners and the NYSERDA contract appendices;

27 Sept 2010 COB

Project team supplies all
feedback/revision suggestions on draft complete RFP to Croton (Lindsay with
CC to Leo and Susan)

30 Sept 2010 or sooner

Croton team prepares final
RFP and delivers to Croton clerk of works, (Janine King Asst Vill Mgr)

1 Oct 2010 or sooner

Croton (Janine King, Asst
Vill Mgr) sends final RFP to the 5 finalist potential contractors

15 Oct 2010, COB

Proposal from contractors
due back to Croton (Janine King with CC to Village Clerk Paula DiSanto and
Mayor Leo Wiegman) (Janine will be out of office that day), and Croton will
forward responses to the NWEAC project team by 16 Oct.

22 Oct 2010

Project team reserves the
right to conduct interviews (face to face) with one or more potential
contractors to review the submitted proposals.

29 Oct, 2010

Project team submits a
final award decision to Croton clerk of the work and announces the awardee,
subject to the Village Board resolution.

1 Nov 2010

Village Board votes on
resolution awarding the work.

1 December 2010 or sooner

Awardee vendor begins
work.

28 February 2011

End of Quarter 1

31 May 2011

End of Quarter 2

31 August 2011

End of Quarter 3

30 November 2011

End of Quarter 4: project
concludes: 7 northern Westchester municipalities will have shiny new Greenhouse Gas (Energy) Inventories and Climate Action Plans (with built in $ costs per action item) just in time for municipal budget season!


[16 August 2010] View executed contract from NYSERDA that just arrived.


[11 August 2010] RFQ responses are here!

We got a great set of responses as Statements of Qualifications from our RFQ announcement. The firms/collaboratives that submitted qualifications by the end of business on 2 August are listed below. We will be examining these closely between now and the end of August. Thank you to all these teams for submitting such thorough qualifications! The Village of Croton-on-Hudson, as lead proposer, has signed and returned the grant contracts to NYSERDA and is awaiting executed documents from NYSERDA. Meanwhile, the grant team will be finalizing the scopes of work and information resources for each partner municipality. The refined scopes of work will be included in the final RFP.
Once the executed contracts arrive, we will be authorized to send out the request for proposals (final RFP) to bidders.

Firm (alphabetically by team name)

AKRF, Inc.

Babylon Project

Blue Springs Energy, LLC

Buro Happold Consulting Engineers, PC

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Clean Air–Cool Planet / Lillium Consulting

Ecology and Environment, Inc.

First Environment, Inc. / VHB

Great Forest Inc.

ICLEI–

Local Governments for Sustainability

Leonardo Academy,

Inc.

/ Climate Action Associates

Sustainable Design Collaborative, LLC / Climate Change & Environmental Services, LLC / Climate Action Associates



[20 July 2010]

NYS Stimulus Oversight Panel information

The Governor asked that all recipients of ARRA funding be made aware of

this important message from the New York State Stimulus Oversight Panel.


[19 July 2010] NYSERDA’s Waste Stream Management Plan
NYSERDA asked us to fill out this waste stream management plan for the waste that would be created in the course of our grant’s delivery of work on greenhouse gas inventories and climate action plans. As our grant mainly entails “office work,” we responded with this plan.
[16 July 2010] NYSERDA’s agreement has arrived for our grant.
Croton’s village manager will sign and return it and once we get executed copies back, we can launch the RFP, assuming we have collated the RPQ replies.(How many acronyms we can squeeze in here!) The relevant sections on generic scope of work and payment are found on pages 16-22 (of 50). Download the agreement here.

[5 July 2010] New Draft Scope of Work and final Request for Qualification
See download files
dated 06-30-2010/07-05-2010

under Attachments below or this link to download the drafts SOW and RFQ . The RFQs will be sent to the potential bidder we have identified to date.
All
RFQs responses
are to be submitted in
electronic format as emailed attachments in either word-searchable PDF or a
version of Microsoft Word prior to Word 2007 no later than 5 PM, Monday, August
2, 2010 to jking@ crotononhudson-ny.gov with “RFP 10” in the subject line.

[18 June 2010] Draft Scope of Work and Request for Qualification
See download file (“
SOW_RFQ_drafts_061810.zip

“) under Attachments below or this link to download the drafts SOW and RFQ for our meeting next week.

[3 June 2010] Some other useful documents and links:
We will post the draft Scope of Work shortly for each municipal team to customize to their own needs.
[24 May 2010] Follow up from today’s face to face meeting and preparation for next meeting (2 June 2010,Wed., 4 pm-6 pm, location TBD).
1. Re-examine your 3×3 emissions/sector grid: Write down the existing resources for each sector (government, business, residential) that your municipality can make available to the consultants we hire. Bring your 3×3 emission/sector grid notes to the 3 June meeting and email them to Leo by noon that day: Send your notes to (lwiegman [at] crotononhudson-ny.gov). Relevant resources could be
  • a document (e.g. NYPA facility survey of municipal building from 2005, Performance contract between school district and an energy services company),
  • a group (homeowners or neighborhood associations, Chamber of Commerce),
  • volunteers (name of your municipality’s volunteer Energy Action Panel, Sustainability Committee, Environmental Advisory Board, etc and its contact person/chair),
  • staffers (full or part time municipal employees, if not yourself), or
  • other sources of useful information that might help us obtain actual measurements or help us develop statistical samples that are valid, (e.g. Corltandt Heating Oil Program mailing list, Peeskskill’s Business Improvement District, etc).
  • For each resource document, include a precise online link to it or a good clean copy that we can scan. For each human resource (group or individual), include the exact name of the group and the contact information.
2. Major points of agreement we resolved or discussed to day include the following:
  • We will develop a list of deliverables for each quarter upon which to base the quarterly payments we request from NYSERDA (which will also alert potential consultants to the invoice trigger points).
  • We will follow Clean Air Cool Planet Emissions Calculator 6.4 or latest, which ICLEI protocols also follow, and other methodologically sound tools as needed for the “hard to get” conversions.
  • We will strive to have a uniform and transparent methodology used for all the inventories and climate action plans so as to allow for cross-municipal comparisons and data aggregation.
  • We will work to establish inventories that are as detailed as possible, especially with regard to the public sector operations, to maximize the implementation of actionable plans based on the inventory information. (This detail will help in future grant writing and future bid development for implementing work.)
  • We will examine how or whether to integrate analysis of the school districts into these studies.
  • We will aim to develop at least some sections of each climate action plan to enough detail that they become an efficient basis for cost estimates of actual implementation work, e.g. as in a ASHRAE Level 3 energy audit (click here for more on this).
  • We will use the individual municipal resources and interests to find the common aspects and use the commonalities to describe the overall scope of work. However, we anticipate that each municipality may have specific areas of work that are unique. The likely resulting scope of work will contain both inquiries common to multiple municipalities and the specific requests for a single municipality.
  • We will use actual data for the 3 scopes (direct, power and indirect) for the governmental/public sector. We will use statistical sampling or a case example sampling (of one district within a community) to estimate the business and residential emissions impacts.
3. Would it be helpful to spend 20 – 30 minutes at start of 3 June meeting on “What is a Greenhouse Gas Inventory?” I could walk us through the Croton GHG inventory, warts and all, as a hands on example. That might clarify what we are asking our consultants to prepare.


[10 May 2010] Download your “homework assignment” memo as “.docx” file or .doc file to annotate for 24 May 2010 face to face meeting in Somers.

Dear RFP 10 GHG/CAP project team:

Your homework
between now and 24 MAY is as follows:

  1. Think about how you would acquire the best data for each box in
    the 3 x 3 grid below within your municipality.
  2. Take notes in any of the boxes below for which you have ideas or
    past success to share with the group, e.g. I would be happy to share a village
    employee survey in Croton to obtain commutation and travel information that
    received an 80% response rate.
  3. Be prepared to prioritize which sectors should have highest
    priority under your portion of the grant funding, e.g. generally, governmenat
    sector is a must to obtain, so how much priority would you put on obtaining
    business versus residential information?
  4. Consider which existing interest groups in your municipality
    should be invited to help with data gathering, e.g. a chamber of commerce, a
    home owner’s association, etc.
  5. Bring this 3×3 table worksheet with you to 24 May meeting!

While this grid derives from the data
needed for GHG inventories, it applies equally well to Climate Action Plans
that flow from inventory information, since the actionable items for each
sector will be distinct, if parallel.

Greenhouse Gas Inventory and Climate Action Plan 3×3 grid of Scopes and Sectors

Emissions: 3 Scopes x 3 Sectors

[ Scope of emissions in rows below/ Sector (source) of
emissions in columns on right ]

A. Government

[Emissions here are typically easiest to obtain and often have
high resolution, but governmental emissions are typically a small slice of
total pie. Whatever we do, the data from municipal operations should be as
robust and detailed as possible both to produce local action items and set a
model for other sectors.]

B. Business

[Emissions here
may be the most diverse sector given the range in business sizes for a given
community. However, targeting the biggest commercial activities in each
municipality or working with local Chambers of Commerce may produce good
estimates. We might consider targeting a single business district within a
municipality as a potential model.]

C. Residential

[Emissions here
may be the most difficult to obtain unless we identify good proxies for the
actual housing stock and consumer behavior patterns. An alternate approach
would be to do so for a neighborhood within the municipality as a smaller
scale model.]

1. Direct
emissions: vehicles, heating, combustion, etc.[Emissions here
are typically the biggest slice of the total pie, involving many different
fuel types and activities to capture.]

2. Power
emissions: electricity purchased from grid [Emissions here
are typically easiest to obtain via NYPA/ConEd/NYSEG utililty bills and use
of e-Grid data on how that electriicty was generated.]

3. Indirect emissions: solvents, commutation, fertilizer, waste stream, etc. [Emissions here
are most difficult to obtain and, if omitted, may produce an undercount of
15% of more.]

See you on 24 May in Somers! -Leo Wiegman


[15 April 2010] 7 NWEAC municipal partners have been awarded the $279,800 NYSERDA RFP10 Energy Management Personnel grant to develop greenhouse gas (GHG) and climate action plans.

Introduction: This grant team is partnership of 7 Consortium members, including one city (Peekskill), one village (Croton-on-Hudson) and five towns (Beford, Cortlandt, North Salem, Pound Ridge, & Somers), totaling 109,406 residents according to the 2007 Census of Governments. As of April 2010, these 7 partners represent over 60% of the total population of the 13 member Consortium.

The results of these projects will be shared with the other NWEAC communities that might benefit from the findings and insights. This proposal funds outside assistance to conduct ICLEI-compliant GHG emissions inventories for 4 NWEAC towns that have not yet conducted GHG inventories, to develop Climate Action Plans for those 4 towns, as well as 2 additional NWEAC towns that have already conducted their GHG emissions inventory and to conduct a GHG inventory for 1 NWEAC town that is updating its 2004 GHG inventory. (See Table 1.)

Table 1: Which municipalities will pursue which work with this funding

NWEAC municipality GHG inventory Climate action plan Population
Bedford Update 2004 GHG inventory [Climate action plan adopted] 18,612
Cortlandt Need to conduct first GHG inventory Need to develop Climate Action Plan *28,672
Croton-on-Hudson [government sector GHG inventory completed] Need to develop Climate Action Plan 7,919
North Salem Need to conduct first GHG inventory Need to develop Climate Action Plan 5,178
Peeskill Need to conduct first GHG inventory Need to develop Climate Action Plan 24,601
Pound Ridge Need to conduct first GHG inventory Need to develop Climate Action Plan 4,978
Somers [GHG inventory in development] Need to develop Climate Action Plan 20,051
*Cortland town pop. excluding Croton 110,011

The Grant’s project team comprises at least one liaison member from each of the 7 partners. This team will refine the scope of work in anticipation of reaching grant agreement with NYSERDA some time in June 2010. The detailed scope of work will become a request for proposals that will be available through this website after the signing of the final agreement between NYSERDA and the NWEAC municipalities for this grant. The outside contractors will work with the liaisons, town energy committees, town staff and elected boards as necessary.

Note: The core description of the proposed project submitted in our grant application in February 2010 to NYSERDA is Attachment E (10 pages, PDF) found in the file called “10atte_[Croton_NWEAC1]_Narrative.pdf” below. Click here for a map of the 7 Partner municipalities.


* 10atte_[Croton_NWEAC1]_Narrative.pdf – on Apr 30, 2010 10:02 AM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* Competitive_Procurement_Certification_Croton_19534.doc – on Sep 23, 2010 9:35 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* CriteriaForRFQresponses082010-checkbox.doc – on Sep 23, 2010 9:27 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* CriteriaForRFQresponses082010-checkbox.pdf – on Sep 23, 2010 9:27 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* Croton_GHG_inventory_2009v1a_complete.pdf – on May 24, 2010 1:18 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* Draftcontract_NYSERDA_RFP10_Croton_19534.pdf – on Jul 16, 2010 3:26 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* NWEAC_RFP_10_GHG_3x3grid_2010_05_10.doc – on May 10, 2010 3:52 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* NYSERDA-RFP10-NWEACcontract-19534.pdf – on Dec 1, 2010 6:39 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* RFP10atte_Croton_NWEAC_proposal-Narrative.doc – on Jun 3, 2010 5:37 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* RFQ_BidderList_for_RFP10_Scope_of_Work_25_Firms.doc – on Jul 6, 2010 10:12 AM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* RFQ_letter_final063010.doc – on Jul 3, 2010 4:11 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* Scope_of_Work_RFP10-GHG-CAP063010-accepted.doc – on Jul 3, 2010 4:11 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* StimulusBrochureSinglePage.pdf – on Jul 20, 2010 4:46 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* WasteStreamPlan_RFP10_Project223_Croton_NWEAC_GHG_CAP.doc – on Jul 20, 2010 4:48 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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* WasteStreamPlan_RFP10_Project223_Croton_NWEAC_GHG_CAP_revised2.doc – on Sep 23, 2010 9:35 PM by Leo Wiegman (version 1)
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