Jacksonville Electric Authority In 1996, LEI entered into a partnership agreement with a major Southeast U.S. utility to help them reduce their project costs. Upon entering the agreement, we were performing work under an annual contract on a time and material basis for this client. Since we were consistently under-running budgets by 25%, we were selected to enter into a value engineering agreement with the utility. This agreement gave us the flexibility to change the specifications within the regulations and design other cost saving techniques without sacrificing safety or quality. In turn, we shared in the savings that resulted at the end of the project. The initial pilot project under this agreement consisted of the abatement of the entire balance of plant systems and equipment at one of their power plants. On an original budget of $1.2 million for this project, we ended up saving the client $375,000. Needless to say, we are still performing work for this client under this agreement.