Texas state workers test drive car2go

A smart fortwo car sits on display in downtown Austin.

Scattering hundreds of blue and white cars around Central Austin is a new idea for combining personal public transportation with the convenience of driving your own car.

The distinctive smart fortwo cars are part of the car2go program being piloted in the Texas capital and in Ulm, Germany, not far from parent company Daimler AG’s headquarters in Stuttgart.

The pilot program began with the City of Austin and quickly expanded to some State of Texas employees, and now to the general public. More than 3,000 Austin residents, City of Austin employees, and state employees have signed up for car2go member cards, which they can use to either charge their drive time to business or private accounts.

The state’s Council on Competitive Government, whose mission is to identify and evaluate competitive alternatives to existing government processes, saw car2go as a potential alternative to the traditional options for transporting staff traveling on state time. CCG and the Texas State Preservation Board partnered to sign a pilot agreement allowing state parking to be set aside through the fall to assess the long-term value.

“As a state we have 28,000 vehicles in the fleet; 4,000 of those are passenger-type vehicles acquired to move staff around,” says Dustin Lanier, CCG director. “We have a really big on-books fleet. We also, in effect, manage a very large off-books fleet because we pay state employees to drive their cars for state purposes. The top 10 agencies spend about $50 million to reimburse their employees for using their own vehicles.”

As well as paying staff for using their own vehicles for state business and maintaining a fleet of vehicles at taxpayer expense, the state also owns parking garages, lots and on-street parking spots.

CCG has two aims with car2go: first, to assess the interest of agencies and state employees in car sharing options and, second, to try to find creative ways to reduce the amount of the state fleet’s footprint and cost of managing the fleet. The car2go program could meet both targets, and the state can save money by bartering vehicle access for a commodity that car2go needs to make its business function — valuable parking spaces in downtown Austin.

CCG and the State Preservation Board, which manages the Capitol Complex parking meters, negotiated an agreement with car2go to exchange on-street parking for a pool of minutes that state employees can use the cars during the pilot program.

“You don’t necessarily see people do experiments in government,” Lanier says. “This is an experiment; this is a pilot that we’ll do through the fall of 2010. Then we’ll decide: Do we keep doing this? Do we do it a different way? What did we learn?”

The two-passenger limit to the Smart cars means that CCG will continue to look at similar options that can transport workers when larger-capacity vehicles are needed, Lanier says.

Paul DeLong, Daimler’s car2go marketing and sales manager for North America, says users are taking the cars for trips as short as five minutes up to all day long. The pilot program charges 35 cents per minute, discounted hourly rates of $12.99, and a daily rate of $65.99. All prices cover fuel, insurance, maintenance, mileage, and parking.

“Our business model supports short trips as well as day-long rentals,” DeLong says. “Mileage is the same thing… from short distances of two miles to longer distances of more than 20 miles.”

For car2go to be successful, the vehicles have to be used multiple times during the course of the day. DeLong says vehicles not being used in one area will be moved to busier spots.

Apply for a car2go member card online at www.car2go.com, and check out their real-time map to find out where you can find an available car to either reserve or just walk up to and drive away.

For troops, Houston clinic eases stateside transitions

Houston’s Post-Deployment Clinic evaluates and treats soldiers returning from service.

Veterans returning from assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq sometimes have underlying physical and emotional problems that can take time to become apparent. In the Houston area, a new Post-Deployment Clinic created by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center is working to ensure they get the help they need as soon as possible.

The center, which opened in September 2009, “offers returning veterans comprehensive physical and mental health evaluations and case management assessments,” says Fern Taylor, the program’s coordinator. “We’re an entry point — we offer these examinations and then hand them off to their own primary-care providers.”

The Post-Deployment Clinic provides a single, central location providing a variety of evaluation services that target returning veterans’ physical, social and mental health needs. Specialists involved in the clinic include a physician, a physician’s assistant, a nurse case manager and a social work case manager.

Since last September, the clinic has seen nearly 1,700 returning service members.

“It works so much better,” says Taylor. “Before, veterans would have the same comprehensive exams, but they would have to go to several different places for them. Most of the time, you couldn’t have them all in the same day. So we serve as a ‘one-stop shopping’ clinic.”

The clinic’s multi-faceted evaluations require several hours.

“They’re going to see three or four staff members,” says Taylor. In addition to a medical exam, “they’ll be put through a mental health evaluation, where they’re encouraged to talk about their combat experiences, and from that information we determine what their continuing needs may be. Do they need to talk to a psychologist? Do they need a psychiatrist for medication maintenance? Do they need a group session, or individual counseling? That’s what we try to learn at that point.”

The evaluations also include social assessments to determine their other needs, “and if they’re leaving the service, to make sure they have a roof over their heads,” Taylor says.
And the clinic provides a valuable opportunity to ensure that returning personnel are signed up for other veterans’ programs.

“A lot of returning personnel need assistance with nonmedical benefits they’re entitled to,” says Taylor. “We help them with how they apply for compensation for service-related injuries and illnesses, the GI Bill, home loans, vocational rehab and so forth.

“These initial assessments are so very important,” she says. “We don’t want our veterans in crisis mode. We want to see them at the very beginning.”

For more information on the Post-Deployment Clinic, or to see how the clinic can serve you or a loved one, visit them online.

New program helps students build companies

Randall Crowder

One of the biggest hurdles facing innovators and entrepreneurs is moving from the idea phase to commercialization. Attracting investors who are willing to take a chance on an unproven idea is difficult but without that backing, ideas and prototypes die.

“Within the Austin entrepreneurial eco-system, it’s imperative that we better facilitate the process of connecting passionate entrepreneurs with active investors,” says Randall Crowder, co-founder of Texas Venture Labs (TVL).

Texas Venture Labs is the newest initiative at UT-Austin to support entrepreneurship, innovation and company formation. Its purpose is to promote new venture creation by providing direct links to resources and funding. TVL will open its doors, so to speak, in fall 2010 after recruiting 30 top graduate students from the university’s business, law and engineering schools. These students will serve as “TVL Associates” and work in five-person teams alongside entrepreneurs and investors throughout the new venture creation process.

“We want to make launching a company part of the student and faculty experience on campus,” says Rob Adams, TVL’s director. “We want to help them mature through the formation process so that as they go off campus, they will understand better what investors are looking for and what questions they will ask.”

Although TVL is a new organization, it is merely formalizing the existing undercurrent of innovation that has been alive for some time at UT-Austin. At any given moment, Adams says, there may be as many as 30 future companies in the raw idea stage on the UT-Austin campus.

Fostering that entrepreneurial spirit is critical to Texas maintaining its reputation for innovation and value creation, Crowder says.

“There are a lot of people out there right now who claim that there are no good deals to invest in. We disagree. There are just as many compelling ventures as there were in 2007. In fact, I’d argue that an economic crisis actually produces even more entrepreneurs because they decide that now is the best time to pursue what they have always dreamed of doing.”

Related: See how Texas entrepreneurs are getting a lift up from Tech Ranch Austin.

Irving to build ‘Net Zero’ middle school

The Irving Independent School District’s (ISD) newest middle school has broken ground without moving an ounce of dirt.

When its doors open in fall of 2011, the 150,000-square-foot “net zero” school promises to produce as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year. The project is the first of its kind in the state and the first net zero middle school in the nation.

Growing Green

From 1983 to 2006 the school district’s enrollment grew an average of 568 students a year, with an increase of 5,016 students from 2000 to 2006.

In 2007, voters approved a $250 million bond package that included funds to build the district’s eighth middle school. School district officials decided the construction of a net zero building would lessen the school’s impacts on the environment, reduce the district’s utility costs over the life of the school, and provide Irving ISD students with a renewable energy learning lab.

“The school becomes a three-dimensional learning environment,” says Scott Layne, assistant superintendent for support services for Irving ISD.

The building, to be located on 17 acres at 3601 W. Pioneer Drive [map], west of Belt Line Road, will feature approximately 64,000 square feet of rooftop solar panels and 10 to 15 onsite wind turbines to generate power. A light dimming system, insulation and shelves that harvest daylight will help conserve power, while a geothermal system will heat and cool the school. All of this should reduce energy costs by 50 to 70 percent when school is in session, and produce an energy surplus when school is out. That energy will then be sold back to the electric company, Layne says.

“Generating power onsite will allow us to reduce our overall energy usage for the building, which will result in cost savings to the district in terms of the utility budget,” he says. “Any reductions in usage that can reduce the utility budget allows for more money to be appropriated for educational programs.”

The district has about $24.7 million from the 2007 bond election to build the net zero school, which will house up to 900 students in grades 6 through 8. District officials say they need 20 to 30 percent more funding to pay for the energy-producing components of the school.

“We are looking for groups who want to partner on this,” Layne says.

Net Zero Nation

Similar but smaller net zero school construction projects are under way in Richardsville, Kentucky  and Los Angeles, Calif., but Irving’s school will be the largest.

Kentucky’s Richardsville Elementary, which is slated to open this fall, will have exterior walls made of insulated concrete and Styrofoam. It will also have a geothermal HVAC and water-heating system, an air-monitoring system that regulates ventilation, and a north-south orientation with skylights and windows that allow daylight into classrooms, the gymnasium, the media center and the cafeteria.

Officials there expect the building to consume about 75 percent less energy than the national average for school buildings. The elementary school will feature 40,000 square feet of solar panels.

Learning Lab

In addition to onsite energy generation, officials hope to instill a new generation with green energy knowledge.

“The school is more than a box that houses kids,” says Marie Morris, Irving ISD’s assistant superintendent for teaching and learning. “It’s a learning laboratory.”

Morris and a group of the districts curriculum experts, science teachers, a technology professional and teacher trainer have been combing through the K-12 curriculum to find connection points to the school’s learning lab. Elementary students may study the differences in solar energy production on a cloudy versus a sunny day, while high school students may calculate the school’s average geothermal output.

Layne says the school’s solar panels will produce about 40 percent of the school’s energy while the wind turbines could produce about 1 percent. They would be used primarily for educational purposes.

Interactive website brings doctors, patients together

The best of modern technology and old school doctoring have melded to bring Texans reasonably priced access to health care via a high tech house call.

For $45 per visit, patients can link up securely with a doctor from one of five physician groups in the Dallas area by phone, keyboard chat or a webcam to discuss whatever ails them. No appointment is necessary, but the Texas Medical Board requires that patients must have an office visit with the physician prior to using the service.

NowClinic, a subsidiary of OptumHealth Care Solutions, was founded as a way to address patients’ frustration with getting timely doctors appointments. By 2013, 25 percent of care that can be delivered online will be, say analysts at Gartner Inc., a leading information technology and advisory company.

“If you look at the statistics, 70 percent of Americans can’t get an appointment with their doctor on the same day that the care is needed,” says Rob Webb, OptumHealth CEO. “We wanted to address this growing need.”

Texas was chosen as the first state to use the system because of its large rural population, which translates to distance and accessibility problems for patients, NowClinic officials say.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources, 114 of 254 Texas counties are classified as primary care shortage areas. Statistics released by the U.S. Census Bureau in September show 25.1 percent of residents do not have healthcare insurance, the highest rate among states.