Ombudsman

I am honored that NAESCO has engaged LARC Consultants LLC (for which I act as Managing Member) to serve as its inaugural ombudsman. My first experience with NAESCO dates back to 1995, when NAESCO asked me to assist in designing an accreditation program. My role then was to bring my legal expertise as outside antitrust counsel to design a program that would fairly permit both companies with track records, and those with capabilities but no track record, to qualify for NAESCO accreditation. Working with engineers and consultants who understood the technical qualifications of an ESCO, we collaborated to design the first ESCO accreditation program, which launched in 1996. NAESCO asked that I serve on the initial Accreditation Committee, which I have chaired since 2000, and continue to do so today. In my nearly 30 years of service on the Accreditation Committee, I have reviewed more than one hundred accreditation applications, interviewed several hundred customer references, and learned a great deal about energy savings performance contracting.

As ombudsman, LARC Consultants LLC will apply my decades of NAESCO experience and my 35 years of legal experience in investigations to provide efficient, knowledgeable and unbiased review of complaints by customers or industry members. To be clear, the ombudsman neither mediates nor arbitrates private disputes. Rather, the role of the ombudsman is to assess whether specific acts and practices may have violated NAESCO's ethical guidelines, or otherwise may reflect negatively on the integrity of the industry and the confidence that the public places in NAESCO member companies and, if so, to report those findings to the NAESCO Executive Committee for appropriate action.

Robert Lipstein, Managing Member, LARC Consultants