Corruption in contracting at FCPS - Cenergistic - fmr School Board and Superintendent implicated
Time (past time) to clean house...
Fairfax County, Virginia’s former schools auditor said that when a whistleblower brought her evidence that implicated Cenergistic as well as top school officials, both the whistleblower and the auditor were fired by those same officials.
From the Daily Caller:
https://amp.dailycaller.com/2019/12/17/cenergistic-green-energy-enron
But a new lawsuit, a decade of government investigations, and news reports show that Cenergistic is an Enron-linked, for-profit company that has allegedly talked its way into no-bid contracts after secretly putting school officials on its payroll, and then billed districts for questionable savings whose basis it refuses to explain.
The contracts are typically awarded by school board members who want to make a statement about environmentalism, and are sometimes exempted from scrutiny on the basis that the money being paid is “free.”
The company teaches “employees how to save money on utility costs by monitoring and assessing usage, and making recommendations for energy conservation such as turning off computers when not in use; turning out the lights when rooms are vacant; reducing the plug load; and turning off vending machine lighting,” the Alabama Advance-Local reported in 2013.
In a lawsuit filed Nov. 1, 2019, the former auditor for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia, Goli Trump, said she was fired by school board president Sandy Evans in retaliation for pursuing an investigation into Cenergistic that implicated superintendent Karen Garza as well as Evans herself.
As soon as FCPS created an independent auditor’s office, an employee of FCPS — one of the largest school districts in the country — told her “Cenergistic’s purported energy savings were not true and were in fact costing FCPS considerable sums of money,” the lawsuit said. The whistleblower, known as John Doe in the lawsuit, said he faced retaliation after reporting his concerns to supervisors.
“Moreover, John Doe pointed out that Cenergistic was supposed to receive payments in an amount equal to 50% of the realized energy savings by FCPS; although Cenergistic said it had saved FCPS $5 million, it had billed FCPS $4 million, and John Doe had been unable to find anyone who could explain this result,” the lawsuit said.
He also said “that the Cenergistic contract did not comply with public procurement requirements.”