Administrators, employees explore ways to ease pain at the pump

To a large extent, University employees choose where they live and work — and how they get to work. But they cannot control the price of gasoline.

This immutable fact has affected all University employees, and as gas prices have climbed past $4 a gallon, Brady Jacobs and his wife, Shirley, have felt the financial pinch. Both are housekeepers who drive 60 miles a day to campus from their home in Hurdle Mills, which Jacobs described as the “real country part of Roxboro” in southern Person County.

From left, Steven Anderson, Betty Wilkerson, Earline Newman and Ed Newman, all from Housekeeping Services, stand beside the Newmans’ Buick Regency in which they carpool to campus from Roxboro each day.

“It’s affecting me real bad,” said Jacobs, who drives to work with Shirley in his 2001 F-150 Ford pickup truck with an odometer that at the end of June read 144,000 miles. Most of those miles, he estimated, were racked up getting to and from work.

As more of the Jacobs’ take-home pay goes into their gas tank, there is less for everything else, from groceries to electric bills. The $100 a week they pay for gas accounts for about 14 percent of the couple’s combined weekly take-home pay.

Asked how many miles to the gallon his truck got, Jacobs chuckled. “The way that thing burns, probably not much more than eight miles to the gallon,” he said.

They would be in even worse shape, Jacobs said, if not for the second job as an elementary school janitor he has held for 20 years. After working from midnight to 8 a.m. at the University, Jacobs heads home to catch a few hours’ sleep and then goes to his second job from 1 to 6 p.m.

Jacobs said the situation should improve in two years when he retires at age 60.

Searching for solutions
The rising cost of gasoline has emerged as a centerpiece issue in the presidential election, and it has been a focal point of concern on campus.

The Employee Forum passed a resolution at its June meeting calling for outgoing Chancellor James Moeser to form a group to find creative ways to help staff cope with the impact of gas prices.

Miles from home faculty and staff travel to work Number of Miles  10 miles or less 11–20 miles 21–35 miles 36+ miles Unknown/No Local Address on File Number of Faculty/Staff  7,245 1,178 1,908    591    611 (Source: based on information available from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment)

Even before Moeser received the resolution, he sent a letter to then-President Ernie Patterson expressing support for managers and employees to explore creative, workable solutions.

Moeser asked 11 people from across campus to serve on the Commuting Costs Task Force, chaired by Brenda Malone, associate vice chancellor for human resources. The task force held its first meeting July 15, after the Gazette went to press.

At the June forum meeting, Malone said Carolina’s Commuter Alternatives Program, or CAP, already has in place an award-winning array of transportation alternatives, from fare-free transit to free park-and-ride lots.

Since 2002, the University has partnered with Chapel Hill and Carrboro to make the Chapel Hill Transit system fare-free to all riders. This set the stage for the proliferation of park-and-ride lots strategically placed around town that allow employees and students to park their cars and take buses to campus for free. Now a total of 10 park-and-ride lots serve campus.

In 2006, the University also negotiated a contract with Triangle Transit allowing University students and employees to travel to and from campus on buses, with the University paying the full cost of the passes.

And to help employees who worry about giving up the convenience and peace of mind of having their cars parked nearby on campus, CAP also provides emergency rides home (no matter where the faculty or staff member lives) as well as access to Zipcars for business or personal trips.

Raising the CAP
Quarterly statistics reveal that a growing number of University employees are taking advantage of the array of services available.

In October 2007, for instance, 5,134 of the University’s 11,533 faculty and staff were CAP participants, including 183 Triangle Transit riders, 22 carpoolers and riders in 10 vanpools (three operated by Triangle Transit and seven operated by Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation).

By last month, those numbers had increased dramatically. Total CAP participants increased to 6,243, almost a 22 percent jump; Triangle Transit riders increased to 354, a 93 percent jump; and the number of vanpools grew to 14, a 40 percent increase.

Even with the comprehensiveness of the CAP program and the dramatic increase in participation levels, however, some employees cannot take advantage of the program, either because of the distance they live from campus or their work schedules, Malone told the Employee Forum in June.

Many housekeepers, for instance, start their shifts after all the buses have stopped running, and during the summer, grounds crew members come to work at 6 a.m., an hour before the buses start running.

At the July 2 forum meeting, Malone said the new Commuting Costs Task Force would move quickly to find innovative ways to address the overall situation.

“We all agree that it is important to discuss possible solutions. Most importantly, Chancellor Moeser agreed, and he took the important step of creating a task force,” Malone said.

“Even so, we recognize that there are limits to what the University can do. We can’t change the price of gasoline. But we have already begun to explore a host of strategies, from flexible scheduling to telecommuting, to find a good fit for as many people as possible.”

Last month, Malone sent a campuswide e-mail encouraging employees and managers to explore flexible work arrangements whenever feasible. The University’s goal, she said, is to reduce employees’ expenditures on gas, and at the same time, ensure that they can perform their jobs at an optimal level.

“From an institutional perspective, we already know that some of these strategies will work more easily in some departments than in others,” Malone said.

Taking advantage of options
An early beneficiary of that initiative is Melissa Wilson, an accounting technician in Facilities Services Business Operations, who credits her manager, Kathy Pope, and Ed Phillips, director of business operations, for quickly agreeing to allow employees to work four, 10-hour days.

Wilson, who lives in Burlington, drives her Honda Accord about 33 miles to her office off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Staying home one day each week shaves 66 miles from her weekly commute, and about $8 to $10 a week from her gas bill.

Wilson admits that she could save even more if she opted for vanpooling or the park-and-ride program, but she said she is not ready to give up having her car on campus.

That does not surprise Claire Kane.

As coordinator of the CAP program with the Department of Public Safety for the past four years, Kane spreads information about the program by visiting various campus departments and by having departmental transportation coordinators let faculty and staff know about the options and financial incentives offered. She also distributes a brochure each year detailing the financial benefits for the array of options.

At the invitation of University Forest Manager Thomas Bythell, Kane visited with members of the grounds crew in June to review gas-saving options that they might try, from Triangle Transit buses to vanpools.

Bythell also created a map of the commuting area and placed a stick figure where each member of the grounds crew lives. The map does not reveal names, Bythell said, but it does show a concentration of workers who could, if they choose, form a vanpool to get to work.

One of the people a vanpool might help is Dustin Stanfield, who for the past four years has driven his eight-cylinder GMC pickup truck from Prospect Hill in Caswell County to work.

At current gasoline prices, he uses enough gasoline over the course of a two-week pay period to eat up more than a third of his paycheck. Stanfield said he has thought about buying a car that gets better mileage, but he needs his truck for the farming he does on the side, which adds $5,000 to $10,000 a year to his University salary.

Kirk Pelland, director of Grounds Services, applauds Bythell’s efforts to find a solution in a department where flexible scheduling and telecommuting simply will not work.

Grounds crewmembers work in teams and must start and stop work at the same time to be most effective, Pelland said. And working four, 10-hour days is not an option in the summer because it would mean working and running equipment at the hottest part of the day.

By starting their workdays at 6 a.m. and ending at 2:30 p.m., crewmembers now escape the worst of the heat, said Pelland, who is excited about the possibility of his crewmembers saving money by forming new vanpools.

A plunge to the pool
Kane said she has learned that having information about CAP is not always enough to get employees to sign up for the program. Some have seriously considered joining CAP but in the end could not bring themselves to sacrifice their parking permits.

And Kane concedes that their reluctance is understandable. The United States is still dominated by a car culture, she said, and the Triangle has been shaped by a highway system that allows people to live great distances from where they work.

But that freedom of choice has come at a higher price, both in time and money, she said.

One prime candidate for breaking her attachment to her car may be Deborah Dehart, a new member of the Employee Forum who voted for the gasoline-relief resolution.

Dehart admits that $4-a-gallon gasoline is exactly what it might take to convince her to join a vanpool. She lives in southern Alamance County, between Swepsonville and Saxapahaw.

Dehart, who grew up in Burlington and graduated from what is now Elon University, has worked as a research specialist in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology for nearly three decades. Alamance County, she said, has long been a textile area, but many of those mills are now gone.

The availability of secure, good-paying jobs at the University has been a godsend for many in the county, she said, including people like herself who think of Alamance as their home and do not want to live anywhere else, no matter how far they have to travel to their jobs.

Dehart said she also enjoys her country drive to work in her roomy 2001 Nissan Pathfinder that gets barely 20 miles a gallon and has been driven 181,000 miles.

“I love it enough that I cannot see spending thousands of dollars for a new car to save hundreds of dollars on gas,” Dehart said. “That math doesn’t make sense to me. But I am beginning to look at other options, including commuting in a van.”

If Dehart joins a vanpool, she would still like to keep her parking permit — which, Kane said, vanpool riders can do.

Kane also pointed out that many University employees work in Alamance County, including 25 in Elon, 203 in Burlington, 385 in Graham, 65 in Haw River and 16 near Dehart in Saxapahaw.

Kane reminds people that finding others interested in sharing the commute, no matter where they live, is as easy as clicking on www.gotriangle.org. The Web site lists all existing carpools or vanpools, and if one is not available in a particular area, people can search for others in their area who share an interest in starting one.

“Honestly, every single person who is looking for an alternative to driving to work and paying those high gas bills should go to that site,” Kane said. “Within two minutes, they would find they had options they didn’t know they had.”

Commuting Costs Task Force appointed
Brenda Malone, associate vice chancellor for human resources — chair; Terri Buckner, research associate with the UNC Sustainability Office; Kim Duval, president of the University Managers Association; Archie Ervin, associate provost and director of diversity and multicultural affairs; Mike Freeman, director of auxiliary services; Ray Magyar, transportation planner, Department of Public Safety;	Tammy McHale, senior associate dean for finance and planning, College of Arts and Sciences; Ernie Patterson, former chair of the Employee Forum; Cheryl Stout, parking services administrator, Department of Public Safety; Brian Usischon, senior director of University benefits and employee services, Office of Human Resources; and Richard Whisnant, professor of public law and government.
The task force, appointed by former Chancellor James Moeser, held its first meeting July 15 after the Gazette went to press. The group will meet regularly during the next few months and present its recommendations to Chancellor Holden Thorp early this fall.