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Committee set to save Town $400,000

Good news delivered to Town Council on Monday BY DAVE BURKET The VOICE Christmas has come early for Gordon Marasco and Councillor Bob Hildebrandt.
Quartet
From left, Pelham Mayor Marvin Junkin, Councillor Bob Hildebrandt, Committee Chair Gordon Marasco, CAO David Cribbs. VOICE PHOTO

Good news delivered to Town Council on Monday

BY DAVE BURKET The VOICE

Christmas has come early for Gordon Marasco and Councillor Bob Hildebrandt. Marasco, chair of Pelham’s Utility Sustainability Committee (USC), and Hildebrandt, its council liaison, wore broad holiday smiles late last week as they sat down with the Voice at Town Hall, offering an advance on the good news they planned to deliver to Town Council on Monday evening.

The USC, through months of research and dogged effort, says it will have managed to save taxpayers nearly $400,000 in energy-related costs by the end of this year.

The committee has further identified an ongoing reduction in expense of some $145,000 yearly, with “more opportunities available.”

The savings come from a combination of detective work, negotiation, and correcting oversights occuring under the previous Town Council’s watch.

Events got kickstarted after last October’s municipal election, but before the new council took office. Councillor-Elect Hildebrandt was in the audience last November 4, as the outgoing council heard from Treasurer Teresa Quinlin that the new community centre had shot past its forecasted Hydro budget by $200,000.

“What I did was I immediately wrote an email,” remembers Hildebrandt, who, as a resident member of the Seniors’ Advisory Committee, had kept tabs on the community centre’s construction, including by meeting with construction company representatives.

“I'd kept minutes, and I told them that one day I'm going to be looking over your work and you better do a good job for us.”

Once in office, Hildebrandt asked to review documents related the centre’s construction.

“When I reviewed the contracts, which the clerk's department pulled for me, I didn't see anything dealing with performance or guarantees. In my business, I'm used to seeing performance guarantees. I was used to seeing when you spend this much money, this is how much you [will benefit].”

Hildebrant, 72, was Engineering Manager at Foster Wheeler, which designed power plants and power plant equipment. He retired in 2005.

Long story short, the new community centre’s power equipment was oversized and its staff undertrained. As far as Hildebrandt could discover, the new systems were never properly introduced to staff, a process called commissioning.

“Commissioning also means you check every piece of equipment, make sure it's wired up properly, and everything is hooked together. Now at the MCC, we have a building automation system, a BAS system, but everything isn't all tied together.”

A grant application to help facilitate such improved ties is underway. Up to an additional $40,000 may be coming to the Town, an amount not included in the savings already achieved.

Committee Chair Gordon Marasco, 79, has also had a longstanding interest in electric rates, and what he has previously described to the Voice as arbitrary and unfair changes to electricity rate classifications for many Pelham households.

Is was due to a similar erroneous classification that Hydro One has now agreed to rebate nearly $67,000 in overcharges, related to the community centre’s electric consumption, back to the municipality.

The rebate goes back to the opening of the centre, in April 2018. The rate classification is now “Transmission Service,” rather than “General Service,” representing an approximately 16% reduction in cost. It would never had happened had Hildebrandt not done the legwork.

He sat down with Treasurer Quinlin one Saturday morning, “and we pulled all the Hydro bills from all the different facilities.”

The discrepancy between buildings became apparent once Gordon Marasco then calculated and cross-checked the various rates being charged.

(Complicating matters, two electric utilities serve Pelham.)

The rate reclassification and rebate didn’t come easily.

“It wasn't one telephone call and you're going to get you're money back,” said Hildebrandt.

“It was about $24,000 they came back with,” recalled Marasco. “And we said, ‘No, that's not good enough.’ They were only taking it back to January [2019], and I think we were talking in March or something like that. So we said, ‘We go all the way back to [April 2018, when the centre opened].

Also in the mix is that Pelham—not Hydro One— owns the transformer serving the community centre. It was a $60,000 purchase, and any replacement or repairs are on the Town’s dime. It’s also significantly oversized for the job required. No one seems to know how the Town got stuck with an oversized transformer.

“We don't know,” said Marasco. “We can't find out.”

Marasco noted that the previous council handed over virtually all decision-making to contractor Ball Construction.

On a brighter note, the $36-million-plus community centre’s use of LED lights and energy-saving construction materials has netted the Town a $142,000 payment, also from Hydro One, as part of its High Performance New Construction Incentive. This is included in the nearly $400,000 figure.

Aside from the annual savings resulting from the rate reclassification, and the $67,000 overcharge rebate, an additional $30,000 in savings was realized this year after Marasco and Hildebrandt discovered that no one had thought to turn off the utilities at the decommissioned Pelham Arena, on Haist Street.

From April through December 2018, the building continued to consume electricity and natural gas, despite being empty and unused.

“We caught up to it and found the outside lights were on and the inside lights were on,” said Marasco.

“And the heat was on,” said Hildebrandt.

That aside, both men acknowledged the contributions of fellow committee members Dave Cano, Jeffrey Fee, and Deanna Allen, and effusively praised Town staff for their assistance and enthusiasm in identifying potential savings. Vickie vanRavenswaay, Director of Recreation, Culture, and Wellness, and her staff, came in for particular recognition.

“I can remember the very first meeting I had with James Allen, who was her right-hand man,” said Hildebrandt. “We were sitting in a conference room and we were talking about power and how you calculate power. And James said, ‘I don't know how much I'm saving when I shut a motor off.’ I said, ‘Well that's easy. Motors consume 746 watts per horsepower.’ His eyes lit up and you could just see him. He couldn't get away fast enough because he had to go back to his desk to start calculating.”

“So just a little bit of knowledge from us,” said Marasco, “and Vickie got them all running in the right direction.”

Similarly, community centre maintenance staff are alert to conservation opportunities. Last winter, Hildebrandt often jogged the exercise circuit in the centre.

“There would never a day go by that someone wouldn't be stopping me. One of the old timers, who was working part-time, he was telling me, ‘Hey Bob, we started off, we were running humidity at 20%, we've gotten it up to 30 now.’ It's one of those projects where everybody has come on board.”

This cooperation evidently extends to the province. Both men report that MPP Sam Oosterhoff, with whom they’ve met both at his constituency office in Beamsville, as well as at the recent Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference in Ottawa, has been instrumental in arranging contact with relevant members of Ontario’s PC government, which has made reform of Hydro One a priority.

The pair hinted at the prospect of even better news coming, but declined to speak about it on the record.

In their submitted report to council on Monday night, the committee stated, “We believe there may be more news shortly regarding the Hydro One residential rates, but we must be cautious, as there is some confidentiality required.”

For now, that $400,000 early stocking stuffer will have to suffice.