New legislation introduced for LED Lighting Procurement for City of Cleveland

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 is attached below.

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)  ten-year contract would not benefit the City of Cleveland in fulfilling our LED lighting needs. The status of LED lighting technology [1] 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 [2] from the Department of Energy and other industry sources [3] 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 [4] (this is for safety), LM 79 [5] 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 [6] (as a model); Team Neo [7], and JumpStart [8]; as well as participation in the Department of Energy's Solid State Street Lighting Consortium [9]. 

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 [10] (GE) and Green Mill Global [11]/Fawoo [12]/Fawoo North Tech America [13]. 

Also, it should be pointed out that GE [14] 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.