Why has Tennessee unilaterally withdrawn from the Wal-Mart energy audit program that it — and 18 other state governments — signed on to earlier this month? Only the government knows and it isn’t talking. Was there too much public in the public-private partnership?

From the Associated Press:

Under the program announced May 6 at the National Governors Association’s State Summit on Clean Power and Efficiency, engineers paid by Wal-Mart will visit the capitol facilities to examine lighting, heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems, refrigeration equipment and building structures.

“We’re supportive of Wal-Mart’s broader initiative,” Will Pinkston, senior adviser to Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, said in an e-mail. “But we’ve had a couple of false starts that probably were unique to Tennessee, and we’ve run into some unrelated issues that frankly complicated things.” Pinkston did not elaborate on those issues.

“All things considered, we’re just going to move in a different direction right now,” he said.

What kind of unrelated issues would stop an energy audit? What possible direction could the governor want to move? I wonder if Gov. Bredesen has second thoughts about non-state employees crawling around in the duct work.

And I have to wonder why such a hyper-local story was covered by the AP and not a local paper. They do have journalists in Tennessee don’t they?

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 1920 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Walmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.