His reign marked the height of the Camar Empire and he's credited with so many public works, hospitals, libraries, rest homes and most important he was well known for religious tolerance. So they wouldn't like necessarily tear down the previous um the god Vishnu. They would just allow it all to to exist together. In fact, if you go into Ankarwa, which is primarily Hindu, there are many Buddhas that you will find in amongst the um in amongst the buildings. And this is um a statue lined bridge at the gates of Anker Tom. These are historic crossway crossways crossing moes and they're flanked by rows of 54 divas or gods and assuras, demons. And the stone figures are holding a giant serpent and naga in a tugofwar. And this symbolizes the Hindu myth of the churning of the ocean milk to create the nectar of immortality. The sevenheaded naga which you see all over uh buildings in all over Cambodia is a protector.
Reallocate existing resources, okay, to efficiencies. Um safety, security, and building and and resilience. Uh funding, procurement, facility management solutions, communications, and data. ESIP addresses all of these areas in some form or another, depending on your goals, on your vision, depending upon what is available, okay, in terms of being able to upgrade, to make more efficient, to save those dollars. Okay. Uh next Advantages of ESIP, okay? First and foremost, um many people think that it's necessary to do a referendum to do any type of capital improvement project. Not necessary. In the In the case of ESIP, okay, in terms of funding, you don't need to pass a referendum to fund. Now, don't get me wrong. I want to be clear on this. ESIP does not take the place of a capital referendum. Okay? Referendum encompasses many areas. Okay? Could be additions, could be whatever the case may be.
It's a snake. A protector of Buddha and a symbol of water, fertility, and royalty bridging the human and the divine. These are absara dancers. Classical Cambodian. You can This is also um harks back to Indian dancing as well. They're called Absara dancers. Classical Cambodian performance art rooted in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. They are characterized by slow graceful movements representing and they represent heavenly nymphs. And not far from Anker's temples is the Toni Sop Lake area. and its floating villages and shops. Water is life for these people. Rice and fishing. They float because the water levels of the lake fluctuate greatly over the year. And 3 million people live on and around the lake. Most live off fishing, but the tour boats stop at the restaurants and crafts houses where artisans weave baskets and rugs. Invasive water hyasin are converted into um into income by these artisans especially women whose livelihoods have declined as the fish populations have dropped over 80%.
ESIP does not take the place of them. Okay? But, if you're looking at doing energy efficiency projects, looking at savings, etc., ESIP can support a referendum and take some of that load away from it. Okay? And do it in a non-tax impact way. Because with ESIP in New Jersey, the savings must cover the expense of the ESIP over time. Usually, that time is 15 to 20 years. The savings covers the expense over the time, which means there is not a tax impact Okay? So, we can go to our community and tell your community we're looking at every option before we actually, you know, enter into a, we'll say, larger referendum pool. Okay? That's just New Jersey. So, there's no no referendum involved. Positive taxpayer stewardship? Yes, mention that. Why? It does not have an impact on the taxpayer. Later on in this presentation, which won't be too much longer, I know your time is valuable and you're busy.
Um these these are all this is made from that oak these this this basket these are all made from um from those water hyets. >> Uh show them the egg carton. >> Oh yes. Yeah. You go to the supermarket, no plastic, no cardboard, >> no straw, and then the eggs are nestled in here. >> I could not resist that. Okay, this is my smart, compassionate, generous daughter-in-law, Wanette. Her story is both exceptional and is the quintessential Cambodian story. It's the people's story. I've been struggling with how to talk about the horrors that befell the Camar people from the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s. I first heard about Cambodia when I was a student at TUS in 1970. And the killing of peacefully protesting students by National Guard at Kent State was directly related to the exposure of the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia where 500,000 tons of of uh bombs were dropped on the Cambodian countryside.
Later on, I'll give you an example of a a recent project we did for a school district and and how it worked out with that. Usually in an ESIP, 10 to 40% savings. We average somewhere in the neighborhood of 30% savings. When I say we, uh Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric is an ESCO. It's on your sheet. Energy Services Company. Okay? So, if you hear the term energy services company, we are an ESCO. All right? That's That's who is permitted to provide the services in the state. An ESCO. Less risk. I'm going to address that. And I'm going to let Mr. Billick address the comprehensive solution and include and and construction services, but I'll address the less risk. ESCO allows you to pick your partner. By picking your partner, okay? You know how you do a traditional design bid build, okay? And the low the low bidder gets the work and that's who you have to work ESCO flips that on its head.
Many of us were on the streets protesting. Others of us were in the National Guard, but we're okay now. In Cambodia, >> I was in the National Guard at the time. >> Yeah. In Cambodia, the stage of the 20th century tragedy was set by centuries of land seizures by Thailand and Vietnam, later by French colonialism. a brief hopeful period after independence in 1953 followed by the superpower conflict of the Vietnam War called the American War in Cambodia. >> Oh yeah, here's the slide. >> Yes, it's there. I knew it was there. Deep resentments happened between the city elites and the farmers and country people. So there was a lot of these people lived in two different worlds. Those of us um of a certain age might remember the name Lan Null, the US anointed leader of the 1970 coup which sent Prince, beloved of the country folk into exile.
ESCO says, "You get to pick who you want to work with." All right? Schneider, okay? You do that through a competitive process. That's through an RFP process under the law. Okay? And since this is governed by the law, as long as you're regulated by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, in other words, NJBPU on your sheet like that. Okay? So, it is we have to follow the rules. Less risk. How is it less risk? Well, in a typical project, you go out, lowest lowest bidder, lowest responsible bidder. And that's the keyword, right? Uh but then you come across this problem that Oh, that's a change order. Oh, that's a change order. Okay? Or this Henry is is is pulling her hair. Okay? My god, how are we going to do this? How are we going to handle it? Okay? You the board is saying, "Oh, we got another change order this month." One of the things that Schneider Schneider as an ESCO in this process takes away from you is some of that risk.
The civil war that followed brought to power with the tacet support of Cananuk. He regretted it later. Pulpot and his murderous Cimeair Rouge Mauist ideal of a completely agrarian self-sufficient Cambodia. To achieve this, he and his angry agrieved fighters emptied Ponumpen, forcing city dwellers into the countryside despite their having no farming skills, no food, and the impossible goals for a for rice production. Families were split. Anyone with education, western influences, artists, monks, dancers, musicians were murdered. Millions were murdered. Nearly a third of the population. China and the west turned a blind eye after you could uncertain. The west was had was not about to get involved in another anything in in Southeast Asia at that point. Um, even though Jimmy Carter did speak out against it, after four years of hell, the Vietnamese drove out the Cime Rouge, but sporadic fighting continued for many years.
We take full responsibility for your project, whatever that project may be that we develop in coordination with you. We take full responsibility. Now, once we sign that contract, construction contract, the project goes into place, we put out the bids. We hold all the contracts. So, between us and we'll say a mechanical thing, us and maybe an electrical thing. Okay? Those contracts that they have are with us, not It's our headache, not yours. Because in our contract, we give you a fixed price. And all the headaches, all those things that happen on the job, okay? That's on us. We work them through. You're certainly part of the process, we keep you informed, but that's the risk we take away from you. We absorb the risk. Okay? Is that Is that clear how that works? Okay. One other aspect usually in an ESIP is that there is an option to have a guarantee of savings, an option.
Hansen became the prime minister in 1985 and has ruled ever since. His son is nominally ruling, too, but he he's a he's still he's still the one. Everyone in Cambodia carries the burden of those years. No, thank you. Wet's father and one's sister are the only members of his family of educators to survive. He was separated from his wife and unborn child, never to learn their fates. Wanette and her three siblings were the children of a forced state marriage. And when that marriage broke up, Wanette stayed for a time with her father and aunt. She then went to live with her mother in the streets of Ponampen, then to an orphanage run by some kind Indian Catholic nuns. Even at the age of eight, Wanet knew that she needed to get an education in order to escape the cycle of poverty and exploitation. When her mother came to take her back from the from the school from the from the orphanage, the nuns hid her and her half brother in the rice barrels.
It's It's additional cost under the law. There There's a We'll call it a premium or an upcharge to get a guarantee, but you can do that. If you choose to sign, you don't have to. What does that guarantee say? It says that you're If we're guaranteeing you $100,000 worth of savings in a given and you only get $85,000 worth of savings, we write you a check for $15,000. And then we come in and fix the problem on our dime. Because we don't want to keep writing you checks, we want you to be saving. You want to be saving. That's how the guarantee works. Okay? Who Who determines the savings? Well, the savings are monitored by the BPU, the savings are monitored by an independent third party, which I'll go into details, and the savings are monitored by us. So, you have three entities that are looking at those savings.
When she was nine, a Jesuit priest known as Kik came into her life. He promised the nuns that he would pay for one's education and did all the way through graduate school. >> And there were what, seven or eight of young women like that, right? >> Oh, there were a lot more than that. That was a different a different priest also gave uh Wanette and seven other women land in Ponumpen so they would not have to resort to other ways of life. Um, Kik whose real name is Enrique Figeredo Alvar Alvar Gonzalez aka the bishop of wheelchairs is the son of a Spanish industrial family. After being called to the priesthood in 1985 during his university studies, he's a Jesuit. He was sent to Cambod to a Cambodian refugee village, refugee camp in in Thailand in um and began working with people with disabilities, particularly victims of landmines.
Okay? So, it's not just taking more money. All right? Joe, you hit hit the solution in the in the construction service. So, let's say for example, McFarland needs to have all of their unit ventilators and they just wore out and they bought them. So, about $100,000 a year. Those are the what I call this ballpark. Budgetary pressures are enormous for districts like this. And it's not uncommon for managers to be deferred in the near future. But these units are not self-healing. They will not get any better. They will be worse. So, typically, what happens districts are faced with making very difficult decisions. If your state share is reduced, your healthcare costs go up unexpectedly high. CSAE contracts or not CSAE contracts, my apologies. Your association contracts require increases in salary. These are all financial burdens that we're having to deal with. And when I was on the board of education, we had to make some very very difficult decisions.
He was part of the international campaign to ban landmines, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Thanks to Kik and to Wanet's own sense of self-drive and care, she earned her bachelor degree and a master of independent of international business law. Okay. Assigned to work with Cambodian refugees in 1985, Kik began a life's work that has helped countless numbers of people. Photos of the village when he arrived versus three years later. >> This amazed me. Um Brett brought back a number of TK's books and I I paced through when I saw these pictures. I said, "Wow, one person, this is what one person as sort of the seed crystal bringing people together was able to accomplish in three years." >> Okay, we can go to the next one. So many people had been injured and maimed by landmines that it created a huge need for wheelchairs.
With an E SIP, E SIP give you a little bit of breathing room. And by that I mean, the E SIPs will identify, as I said earlier, efficiencies and savings opportunities that you use existing funds to improve or to support improvements in your capital infrastructure. So, rather than having to make a decision on replacing only one or two unit ventilators at McFarland, you may be able to replace all of them. And package these mechanical, electrical, building envelope projects in a more uniform way and consolidate the bids, rather than having to face diminished improvements in your mechanical infrastructure year after year, and then find out that 5 years from now you have a significant roof issue or a significant issue with your HVC system because they're not providing the appropriate amount of outside air or the heating system's having to fail. Absolutely time after time where uh deferred maintenance becomes an issue and rather than having a program to replace it on a sequential or a scheduled basis and that will work things for sure.
Kik brought people together and including many of those crippled by mines and they were began manufacturing wheelchairs. I asked one where she would be today had it not been for Kik. She answered, "I'd have five kids and be working in a factory for $50 a month." So her her story was extraordinary and it just kind of illustrates how um really to fate how how much um our fates are are up in the air. Okay. Um during the Paul Park regime, so many people were murdered. Um that when uh Paul was finally, you know, kicked out with the help of the Vietnamese, um there were no records of who owned land anymore. Nobody knew. And for a country that was heavily dependent on its agriculture, how do you how do you get a whole country restarted? So in came the NOS's, these conservation organizations. Um these folks right here.
Very very costly. So, one of the benefits of of an ESIP is to through an LGEA which is a local government energy audit or if the board would have decided to move forward and selected SO and do an IGA, that identifies programs, packaged uh repair or replacement systems under the ESIP that allows you all to uh get more work done for the same amount for for the money that the uh district would typically allocate for utilities, uh water, sewer, those types of uh fundamental projects. So, packaging these capital improvement projects under ESIP, again is a no cost alternative to the taxpayer and it allows the district to address all of these long-standing maintenance issues that very common for school districts to have to grapple with. Thank you, Jeff. Uh Dr. Cromwell, very briefly, this is how ESIP works. Simple. Let's say you have a $5,000 $5,000 $500,000 annual energy spend.
This was at a little party sometime before um we left. But it was people like this that came in. uh the alphabet soup of conservation organizations uh wildlife conservation society which is an offshoot of the Bronx Zoo came in and they started negotiating with the government on behalf of farmers to get either um property owned that they could assign farmers to or at least get some leases. And they made a contract with these farmers that they would pay the farmers a premium for their rice if they grew their rice in sustainable ways. Sustainable ways for the forest, sustainable ways for other wildlife that was there. It's been very um highly successful. So I wanted to introduce these people to you. Um, and one of them is is the grandson, Jackson Fchett. Um, and you know, it's it's just amazing some of the backgrounds of some of these people.
Okay? ESIP, we can knock that down with the typical 8:30 30% saving. By the way, this is not your scenario. This is a general scenario. So, I don't want you to think this is your situation. Uh so, we ESIP said we can knock it down to a $350,000 annual energy cost, okay? Saving $150,000 with with that average of a 30% savings, which in turn you can we just highlight some things. As Joe mentioned, HVAC solutions and efficiencies, lighting, IT energy, all those things that you see there, you can take those savings, put it into those items now, okay? Which in turn you pay for it over time, which in turn that savings covers the cost. Okay? That's how the program works. Not going to go over this in detail, but we in turn Schneider Electric as the ESCO, we in turn we do the design and engineering.