Shlachter, Perotin, Fuquay 
Texas jobs agency helps battle drugs
Previous Columns
Shlachter, Perotin, Fuquay
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Glance at the Texas Workforce Commission’s Web site, and you’ll learn that the agency is charged with helping the state’s employers and job seekers with services such as job training, analyzing labor market statistics and administering unemployment benefits.
Now, add "de-glamorizing" drug use to its duties.
Commission Chairman Tom Pauken this week issued a written "editorial," raising concerns about marijuana use and workplace drug abuse.
The commission can help employers create drug-free workplace policies, he said. And he noted that workers who are fired for violating drug rules aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits.
"Nancy Reagan did it. Her 'Just Say No’ campaign worked the first time, and we need another one like it today," Pauken wrote.
Fill ’er up with gas
It was nearly 20 years ago that oilman T. Boone Pickens caused a stir by installing a natural gas fueling station in his own back yard in Dallas amid predictions that in just a few years there would be thousands of stations in Texas to fill up a vehicle with compressed natural gas.
Instead, there are fewer than 800 nationwide, according to the Energy Department. But with the growth of the Barnett Shale in North Texas, folks would like to see compressed natural gas, or CNG, become a much bigger player in the market for transportation fuel.
One of them is Barry Stevens, an Arlington resident who, on his own dime and his own time, is hitting the streets as a natural gas evangelist. He thinks the convergence of the Barnett Shale, crude-oil prices topping $140 a barrel and the search for less-polluting energy all should make CNG the preferred fuel locally.
Or, as he puts it: Energy Independence, Economic Growth and Cleaner Environment.
He’s already called on the city of Fort Worth to show officials there his calculation on how much the city could save by running police cars on natural gas. He’d like to get General Motors’ Arlington assembly plant and the city of Arlington involved.
Wayne Corum, Fort Worth’s director of equipment services, visited with Stevens last week but has a little different take on CNG. The city is ordering alternative-fuel vehicles, he said, but they are flex-fuel police cars that can run on either gasoline or E85, which is 85 percent ethanol.
The city already has about 350 vehicles in its fleet that run on propane (also called liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG), but those are being phased out as LPG has fallen out of favor, Corum said. "LPG was a movement in the mid-’90s," he said, but the equipment for retrofitting engines isn’t being made anymore. The city instead is buying the flex-fuel vehicles and gasoline-electric hybrids.
The Fort Worth Transportation Authority was an early convert to CNG, beginning in 1989. Now all but six of The T’s 184 buses are natural gas-fueled, as are a number of utility and staff vehicles, said spokeswoman Joan Hunter.
And then there’s Chesapeake Energy, which never misses a chance to tout the benefits of CNG as a transportation fuel. The company even runs a CNG-fueled bus to ferry employees around its Oklahoma City campus.
Happy trails to Rudy
Rudy Camacho says he’s calling it a day and folding up Paper Trails, his out-of-the-ordinary card shop at 508 Main St., blaming a stalled economy, departure of some big companies from the city center and recent layoffs that touched his customers.
From now until July 31, his inventory of eclectic cards — some clearly adults only — are discounted by 80 percent, says Camacho, who has no near-future plans other than to catch up on things at home long neglected due to 60- and 70-hour workweeks.
But the stationery retailer leaves with stacks of memories accumulated since opening February 2002.
There was the day a woman asked whether Paper Trails carried luggage.
It doesn’t, so Camacho suggested she try Leddy’s and accompanied her around the block.
They had nothing that suited her. Camacho then offered one of his spare pieces from home and asked how to get it to her.
"I’m performing tonight at the Bass Hall," she replied.
It was Roberta Flack.
Camacho, a fan, already had purchased tickets for himself and his parents for that night’s performance, so the delivery was no chore.
When he showed up backstage suitcase in hand, he heard a now-familiar voice call out:
"Rudy, is that you? Are you out there?"
Flack invited Camacho to a post-performance party she was throwing at her Worthington Hotel suite but he had already promised to spend the evening with his mother and father.
Camacho discovered that visiting Bass Hall performers enjoyed to poking around downtown dangerously close to curtail call, including the singer Natalie Cole.
"Miss Cole, do you realize that your show is in an hour?" he recalled asking Nat King Cole’s daughter.
"Honey," she assured him. " I can throw on a gown faster than you can wink an eye."
