Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, May 25, 2010,
Item 31
31. Consider and take appropriate action on the following: a, receive update from the travis county efficiency committee; b, receive update the travis county green committee; and c, provide direction for next steps.
>> i have requested this item because -- let's see, let me pull out my cheat sheet on this. I had requested this item because both of these committees were established back in 2008 at a time when we were concerned about an economic downturn as well as very concerned about -- about a considerable spike in the price of gasoline and its effect on our overall budget, even absent the economic downturn which we have seen happen. So i wanted to have an opportunity to give kudos to staff for having predicted what might occur in the future and having planned for it and we planned for it well. And i should have mentioned to blaine as well as a representative of the auditor's office, we have done a very good job at predicting what may come and prepare for it. So i thought it would be timely to come back and say what efforts we had undertaken in the last year and several months or two years actually, almost to the day, and also explore things that we are looking toward in the future. Particularly in light of the fact that we may be increasing our tax rate by roughly three cents. And -- and i imagine that some of the other taxing jurisdictions, seeing a reduced revenue stream, will also be thinking of the same. So ... Guys, take it away.
>> thank you, good afternoon, judge, commissioners. Since the committee was formed in 2008, we took -- we really hit a lot of the fuel and utility issues that -- that we were facing at that particular time. Since then, the committee has not been meeting on a regular basis;, however, there have been a number of department initiatives that have been undertaken that -- that have sought out to improve efficiencies throughout their operations and throughout the organization as a whole. What i wanted to do for just a few minutes is touch on some of the committee's work first and then some of the individual department initiatives and talk about them and then -- then give some type to the green committee as well. The committee took up, as i said earlier, the fuel and utilities and we used the 2008 fuel consumption as kind of our baseline year for -- for our initiatives to try to level them off. And we've been fairly successful with that. The 2009 consumption level was slightly higher than the 2008 level, but not significantly higher. And so we were very pleased to see that. The -- on the utility side, we encouraged, as you may recall, we encouraged folks to turn off their computers at night. Turn off their lights when they are going to meetings. Power down equipment when it's not being used. Things of that nature. The results of that initiative saved over $300,000 for the general fund portion in fiscal 8 and we showed a very slight increase in fiscal 09 but we actually attributed that to the very warm summer nos for fiscal '09. We were very pleased to see that the 2009 utility consumption was actually pretty close to the 2008 level. So those initiatives have worked as well. We're currently working on a -- an r.f.p., i believe is the appropriate word for -- for consolidated printer initiatives. To try to consolidate some of our printer fleet. We have a number of departments chomping at the bits to get involved with that, the county attorney being one. And a few other of the elected officials have volunteered as well as some of the appointed officials. So we're looking forward to that. We anticipate that there could be as much as $200,000 a year in annual savings by consolidating our printer fleet. In addition, a number of departments have gone to multi--sided printer output. And so we have reduced paper consumption as a result. We have not been able to really look at the savings for that, but we have seen, we think, some savings on paper consumption. We were excited to see that. As you know, we talked a lot about four-day work weeks, telecommuting, i believe the decision was made regarding telecommuting to try to leave the -- the decision to telecommute up to the elected and appointed officials, where we could. And so -- so that initiative was -- was undertaken as well. Some initiatives on the department side that i wanted to touch on, the sheriff really took a proactive approach and we have to give him some kudos on some of the work that they did. They initiated the save a gallon a day initiative back in 2008 and they actually realigned some of their precinct assignments to more strategic for their employees, so that was something that they took on themselves. In addition to that, there is currently a pilot test going on for -- for -- for batteries to be used while the patrol deputies are on the scene and their lights are on so that they are not running their engine. These batteries are designed to -- to actually recharge when the vehicle is running and it's got an expected life of over three years. So we're looking at that now. Results are yet to be determined. But that initiative has been taken on as well by the sheriff's office. Large number of departments, as small as it may seem, it really adds up, especially with the size of our workforce, have opted to no longer receive printed paycheck stubs. So we're saving there on printing costs, paper costs and envelopes for the paycheck stubs. The addition of building 12 out at the corrections facility has really helped modernize some of our hvac controls out there and it's also helped in terms of the staffing needed for things like inmate escorts. For example, the building is now -- all buildings are now connected to the inmate mall, which allows for inmates to move through that mall area without supervision, which has been a tremendous assistance as far as staffing is concerned. So it's allowed us to kind of reassign or redeploy in that nature. In addition to that, building 12 provides for -- for recreation activities within the building itself. Meaning that there's not a requirement for an officer to be out in the rec yard and so that officer can monitor through windows, through electronic means, the rec yard activities as well as the activities on the inside. So there's been tremendous savings in terms of the efficiencies of building 12, kind of indirect toward the committee, but i wanted to point that out as well. So those are just a few of the highlights over the last couple of years, both by the committee and by the individual departments. I'll turn it over to john.
>> john?
>> good afternoon, john white, t.n.r. Back in october of 2008 '08 you established the green initiative committee and the specific charges to that committee were to manage an environmental assessment of county policies and procedures, identify areas where the county needs to focus attention and resources, prioritize areas where the county needs to focus attention and resources both in the short term and in the long term. And consider utilization of outside expertise as that becomes necessary and we could ask the court for that. Then completion and presentation of an action plan by november of 2009. Clearly we did not meet that last item. We have had some progress on some of the other items. I think that one of the issues that we've had as a committee is that competing priorities of -- of really -- have really sapped our strengths. Especially when items have been drawn off into other things that sort of takes a little bit of the steam out of the committee.
>> let me just interject here. I set this agenda item not to beat y'all up about a final report because we had oh,, you know, like a big economic downturn and the hamilton pool circumstance. And so -- so in no way do i, you know, this agenda item isn't to beat y'all up about that. But now that --
>> i appreciate that. Nevertheless we are seriously overdue. A number of the things that rodney was talking about are things that we have talked about as well. I think one of the things that we discovered right away, is there's a lot of overlap and scattered efforts going on around the country. As a green committee, we would be well served if we could have some way of orchestrating those efforts and coordinating them better with the activities of the efficiency committee, as well as other committees such as the vehicle users committee and probably other committees that i'm not even aware of that might be out there working on some of these items. I especially applaud the effort towards some sort of document preparation -- some sort of document creation fleet, printer fleet that rodmy was talking about -- rodney was talking about. We're going to potentially save a lot of paper by doing that kind of thing. Then there are various efforts that we can implement at various points throughout the various departments. Now, we do have some progress in the areas of looking at policies. And in recent months i've been working with lisa rush to re-evaluate a lot of the environmental policies that are actually in travis county code. It seems to us that perhaps those are -- are not appropriate for all, to be fully blown in the county code, but perhaps could be consolidated into perhaps one chapter of the code as a comprehensive environmental policy. And i will have recommendations on that as well as some specific language that i can circulate very shortly. Some other area that's we have been looking at, we did an extensive review of climate action plans across the country because these are the kinds of things that people are doing where they are actually planning out what specific steps they can take and there are certain common features to these plans that we can report to the court. Don't need to do that necessarily today, but something that we can report to you in fairly short order. Then with the activities of the various other subcommittees dealing with waste management or -- basically a waste reduction committee as well as vehicle management, words -- we're still sort of floundering in how to deal with -- how we work our open spaces and parks into some of this, but there's certainly a lot of opportunity for that as well. We have some partners around here that we can be working with, city of austin is moving forward. They've dedicated staff to a fairly extensive climate action plan efforts. We have the opportunity to work a little bit with them, perhaps piggyback on some of what they do. Austin energy has approached us to talk about things like electric vehicles and the infrastructure associated with those. But again that -- that really goes right to the heart of how we receive this and then how we process this information and exchange it and communicate it throughout the rest of the county in a way that we're not just running off in some direction on our own without everybody else knowing about it. So -- so i guess what i would be looking, i might suggest at this point is we might want to establish some sort of a steering committee relationship here with the efficiency committee perhaps as a steering committee or perhaps a subset of our green committee, to be a steering committee in close working -- working closely with the efficiency e committee and figure out some way to arc straight the efforts of all of the -- orchestrate the efforts of all of these coast to be working with -- efforts to be working with the others at the same time.
>> i also wanted to thank you all for a memo that you sent out march 31st with regard to the waste management, travis county waste management program.
>> [one moment please for change in captioners]
>> i really encourage us to continue to work on both of these initiatives and to coordinate them so that we can identify that low-hanging fruit because 138,000 ain't chumpchange. It would be nice to -- i -- i know we have some impediments in that is we have so many different elected officials inside travis county, it is difficult to coordinate these efforts, but i -- i agree that a -- a -- the creation of the climate action plan certainly would be helpful in coordinating those efforts.
>> and, commissioner, with respect to that particular memo, that one really goes right to the heart of one of our real challenges which is how to get the data that we actually need. It's very difficult in our current circumstances to collect all of the information that we really need, so that $138,000 is something that we really poked and prodded at for a while and i have to be honest with you, i think there is probably a substantial sort of of continence on that but it would be a good guess and another thing would be hard numbers, the papers we actually use. It seems like a fairly simple task, but it is not. We have a fair hi good idea of how recycle, because we have evidence of that but it is very difficult to tell what everybody has actually used.
>> it is a very good point, a very good point. I really appreciate y'all's efforts and look forward to looking more on both efficiency and the green initiatives to see what more we can do.
>> thank you much.
>> thank you.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 2:35 PM
