blog-gvrec.org

Safety at GVR Facilities

In the last few weeks we have had two incidents in the parking lots at West Center and East Center involving illegal immigrants and/or a homeless individual and GVR members or staff.  Fortunately, both individuals were apprehended by law enforcement officials and were resolved successfully with no one injured or hurt.

 We ask that you be aware that there is the potential for interaction with individuals traveling down the I-19 corridor especially at those centers just off the interstate.  This information is not intended to dissuade you from using GVR facilities, but rather to make you more aware of your surroundings.

 Here are some important tips that you can use when visiting GVR’s facilities:

• Park in well-lighted and well-traveled areas, which are busier—well-lit means you can see 100 feet at night.
• If you are alone in your vehicle, try and leave your vehicle or the facility when groups of people may be walking your way.
• Lock your vehicle doors when you leave your car.
• If you feel uncomfortable, ask someone in the facility to walk you to your car.
• Do not walk with your mind filled with other thoughts such as what you need to purchase or other tasks you may have to attend to later. Be aware about what is going on around you NOW.
• Look for suspicious people in the area or near your car.
• Get in your car and lock your doors as quickly as possible. Most abductions occur when people are getting into or loading items into their vehicles.
• If you have a cell phone, carry it with you and have it readily available.
• Call 911 if you are suspicious of anyone.
• Please notify staff of any unusual activity.

 In addition to being more aware, please stay mindful of the tips mentioned, along with trusting your common sense and you’ll be much better off going to and from your parking lot destinations.

We would appreciate your comments and any additional safety tips you might have have for GVR Members!

This year, we are again focusing on available energy reduction programs.  Working in partnership with Tucson Electric Power, we are pursuing electrical reductions of 3% this year by implementing several key efficiency improvements.  This includes a lighting retrofit at Canoa Hills that has the potential to reduce our usage at this site by 133,700 KWH this year.  This project has less than a year simple payback, which makes it an easy decision to make. We were able to have TEP provide a little over $24,000.00 of the project cost with GVR costs of around $5,000.00 dollars.

We have many projects and suggestions come forward each month on what power reductions we should be going after.  These ideas come from our members, staff, utility programs and many others.  When we have identified the most cost effective programs, we move forward and provide information to the planning and evaluation committee for selection and presentation to the board.

As an energy star partner we look at benchmarking our facilities for usage against a national average of users. This allows us to see how we perform against comparable businesses and find what has worked for others. A monthly web seminar is presented by E-star where participant discussions are active and the goal is finding the best practices for our industry.

One of the many items that need to be reviewed when implementing our reduction goals is to make sure we have not created a safety issue with lighting reductions.  In many cases, we have increased the internal lighting in an area while still reducing wattage by the use of newer bulbs. We need to make sure the parking lots and egress areas are well lit and on for the extended periods that our members use the facilities.  This may seem wasteful to have a set of parking lot lights on when the lot is partially filled or even empty, but in the future, we will be looking at rewiring many of our lots to take advantage of partial lighting with the capabilities of shutting off the most exterior parking areas.

The purpose of this blog section is to find ways to help reduce our usage, which then reduces our overall costs for operating our facilities. Please send us your thoughts and ideas and let us see what we can do to keep our operating costs at a minimum.