Shlachter, Perotin, Fuquay 
Turns out 'caring' might have strings attached after all
Star-Telegram Staff Writers
Rent-a-Center, a Plano-based rent-to-own furniture chain, has won favorable coverage up north for its "Random Acts of Caring" campaign, in which employees in New York and Ohio knock on doors and hand out $50 checks to help low-income residents deal with rising energy costs or give out free bus passes.
"Kindness, with no strings," exclaimed a February headline in the Elmira, N.Y., Star-Gazette.
Strings apparently were attached to a $500,000 pledge to America's Second Harvest, a Chicago-based umbrella organization of food banks.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Rent-a-Center complained that an associated group, the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, publicly supported a state bill that would effectively cap the maximum lending rate of the chain's payday unit, Cash AdvantEdge, at 28 percent.
What caught our random attention, aside from the fact that Rent-a-Center is a North Texas operation, is that the article quoted the company's spokesman, Gus Whitcomb. Whitcomb was a well-known American Airlines spokesman who worked for the carrier for eight years before joining Wal-Mart and then going to Rent-a-Center in February 2007.
Whitcomb denied telling The Journal that his employer pressured the Ohio charity.
Instead, he told us that Rent-a-Center merely pointed out that its $125,000 annual pledge for four years should be divvied up among those food banks that focus 100 percent on hunger, as it had originally been assured, and that the portion of moolah earmarked for Ohio be given to other states if it strayed.
If a food bank, say, ran a grocery bag recycling campaign purely to help the environment, would Rent-a-Center protest or demand funds be diverted?
"That's a hypothetical," Whitcomb said.
The Ohio charity told The Journal that it wasn't Rent-a-Center's action that prompted its decision to withdraw from the Ohio Coalition for Responsible Lending, saying it never should have joined a nonhunger-related lobbying effort to begin with.
May Day B-Day
May Day was a big birthday for Sproles Woodard, a Fort Worth-based accounting firm with satellite offices in Midland and New Mexico that marked the 75th anniversary of its founding by Lyle Sproles and Charlie Woodard.
As befits a company in the middle of the booming Barnett Shale, the firm traces its roots to serving oil and gas companies, opening its Midland office in the mid-1940s, amid the expansion of petroleum production in the Permian Basin, and an Artesia, N.M., office in 1979, another boom time for the industry.
Today, close to 70 percent of the firm's roughly 1,700 clients have some connection to the energy business, either as direct operators or through related holdings, said Pat Evans, managing partner. Clients have petroleum properties in Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas and the Rocky Mountain region, he said, but the Barnett Shale hasn't really accounted for a big boost.
In a day when midsize accounting practices are candidates for merger or acquisition, Sproles Woodard has no plans to combine into a bigger organization. The firm has 34 professionals and 43 total employees in the three offices. The Fort Worth office is in Carter Burgess Plaza downtown.
"We've always had an independent operation," Evans said. "We've had firms approach us over time, but we like the way we are. We think it's beneficial to the clients."
Besides the energy practice, Sproles Woodard works with a variety of nonprofits, manufacturers and distributors. It has also developed what it calls a "family office" practice for multigenerational organizations that don't necessarily operate a business but own a portfolio of investments and business interests that require oversight, Evans said.
'Hot' job
If variety is the spice of life, Mickey Flood figures he has found the jalapeño of jobs.
"This is the only industry where you could be driving a garbage truck in the morning and eating dinner with a governor in the evening," Flood, president of Fort Worth-based IESI Corp., said in a recent release announcing his election to the Environmental Industry Association's Hall of Fame. It's hard to tell from the name, but that's the trash business, and IESI is part of the sixth-largest waste company in North America.
Flood will be inducted into the hall Tuesday at the industry's annual trade show, WasteExpo, in Chicago.
He left a job as group president at industry giant Waste Management to start IESI in 1995 with two trucks in Justin. Now, more than 200 acquisitions later, the company has residential, commercial and industrial customers in 10 states, including Texas. IESI provides waste hauling for a number of Tarrant County communities, including Colleyville, Haltom City and Lake Worth.
Flood has spent nearly a lifetime in the business. It was a summer job as a teenager, and other than a brief stint as a teacher after graduating from the University of Miami in 1968, he worked for a succession of companies including Waste Management and Laidlaw Waste Systems.
Pats on the back
Officials with Dallas/Fort Worth Airport praised airport employees at a board meeting last week for how they handled the mass cancellations in April, after American Airlines was forced to ground its fleet of MD-80 jets for inspections.
They noted that they had worked to get information out to passengers and the general public, arranged for vendors to stay open and compiled an online list of area hotels with space available for stranded travelers.
Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief, a D/FW board member, joined in.
"I cannot say enough about our entire D/FW family," Moncrief said. "These folks have done everything they could to deal with an enormous challenge. They need our support, not our criticism. They need our encouragement, not discouragement."
There were no comments at the meeting from any of the estimated 300,000 passengers at D/FW who were affected by the five days of cancellations. But judging from comments made to the news media and posted on the Internet during the meltdown, many travelers don't feel quite as warm and fuzzy about the ordeal.
Trees and parking
XTO plans a 93-space, tree-lined parking lot on the city block where the Landmark Tower once stood, a site plan filed with the city shows. But it's anybody's guess as to when construction will begin.
This month and last, XTO pulled the project from the agenda of the Downtown Design Review Board, reportedly because the oil and gas company wanted to do more tweaking. The parking lot design needs the board's approval before building permits can be issued.
XTO did not return a phone call last week seeking comment.
The block, lined by Sixth, Seventh, Throckmorton and Houston streets, for nearly two years remained a large hole after a spectacular implosion of a 30-story office building in March 2006. It took a demolition company months to haul off the debris and several months after that before the hole was filled in with dirt. The block was excavated to several feet below street level and enclosed by a fence.
According to the site plan, the block will be lined with nearly two dozen trees and other landscaping.
