Nashville Weatherization Program Fraud?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Matt Schwoegler on January 20, 2012 at 9:29am

Hi William, Thank you for the PDF.  Appreciate your help.

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Permalink Reply by William H Nickerson on January 20, 2012 at 9:51am

You know this topic actually makes me sick."its not what we dont know..its what we know for sure that gets us in trouble"

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Permalink Reply by tedkidd on January 20, 2012 at 10:34am

Matt, if you hadn't caused emotional response, would we ever have gotten informative responses from William and Don?  Doubtful.  Now we know some programs are tracking, even though it seems somewhat buried.  

So in the weatherization/not-for-profit side tracking studies are performed and assumedly implementer's receive this information so they can adjust their behavior.  Not clear is if there are "Promises" made to clients.  

Furthermore, people receiving free prescriptive improvements are a completely different market than people who have to decided what improvements they want, and pay for them.  Not sure weatherization folks get how different it is when improvements actually have to be sold. 

In the for profit side results disconnect is complete, at least from what I've seen.  Guys at the helm may know actual to promised metrics but they aren't openly sharing it with us.  

Keep fanning the flames.  

Results transparency will cause contractor and homeowner interests to become aligned.  It will create a whole new metric upon which contractors will compete for supremacy, energy savings accuracy.  Delivering on promise.  (Transparency must occur before contractors can have accountability, blaming us for poor results on a metric nobody was tracking is absurd.)

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Permalink Reply by Barbara Smith on January 26, 2012 at 7:16am

Folks may be interested in this recent post on the WAPTAC blog:

"GAO Releases Study that WAP On Track"

http://www.waptac.org/Blog/

 

Also, there's been a national evaluation of weatherization going on over the last year or more.  We expect that very soon reports will begin to come out of the National Retrospective Evaluation of the Weatherization Assistance Program, which is a grand, nationwide effort to measure, track, and analyze the low income weatherization program in all the states:

http://weatherization.ornl.gov/evaluation_nr.shtml

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Permalink Reply by tedkidd on January 26, 2012 at 8:03am

Barbara, thanks for the link.  Be careful getting excited about "Press Releases," there is usually a lot of makeup hiding the wrinkles.  Please let us know when the report follows.  

Interesting to me is the outline of 4 goals, then claim of dramatic success referencing "exceeding" goal 1.  What I want to know always is the economics of savings.  How much was the budget to save $1 in energy, and how much was spent to save $1 in energy.  I want to see the numbers for goal 3:

(3) the extent to which the weatherization program under the Recovery Act has achieved its energy and cost savings goals

People getting free "improvements" don't care if the improvement saves every penny promised, any improvement for free is a good improvement to them.   If they save 25% of what they were supposed to save that's a win.  But if the program can only deliver 25% on promise, isn't that an overall loser?  

Sure, you can create a lot of jobs, send people out to a lot of homes, and claim they've been weatherized, but without answering number 3 you don't know if the exercise was effective.  

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Permalink Reply by Dale Sherman on January 26, 2012 at 9:25am

Looks like the story is about 1 year old. The only followup story I found was last March.  The Tennessee Comptroller's office investgated the weatherization program and wrote about it in their June 2010 audit report.  This was before the aforementioned news story.  I found no information since then.  I guess we wait for the national evaluation report.

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