Government Cost Savings Ideas

Put ideas here for how to help government be more efficient.

Energy/ Green/ESCO operations:

Using contractors called ESCOs (what's it stand for?), governments (municipal, state, agencies, etc) can contract with an energy provider that comes in, installs solar, new boilers etc, at "no cost" to the government entity. The entity then buys energy from the ESCO for some period of time, with a guaranteed savings. I have only limited experience, but from what I undrestand, the savings is in the order of 20%, plus, depending on the contract, some sell-back to the grid, if appliable.

In Massachusetts, government entities are creating "Green Advisory Boards" as a way to both study opportunities for greening governments, as well as to prioritize and assist operations managers in getting approval for capital expenses required to achieve the energy efficiencies.

Paper Reduction:

Government agencies are already heavily into automation and reduction in paperwork. Your local governments would probably appreciate help in identifying additional paper saving opportunities.

Water:

This is an area which needs a lot of attention. The "established" way to help mitigage impacts to water is to "conserve". But in reality, it's this observer's opinion, that conservation is a stop-gap solution which actually encourages more water usage, because it fails to address the impact of growth. Further, because of governments' addiction to "new tax revenues" from growth, policies avoid mitigating growth, and turn instead of conservation, which is like greenwashing a policy that not only costs more for government in the future, but fails to address accelerated devastation to the environment.

Pensions:

While this observer believes that we should all have a comfortable retirement for good time served. But pension loopholes are allowing government employees to "double dip" and triple dip, effectively being able to garner large pensions, well beyond any "average worker".