Net climbs aboard Front Range Express
Commuters who ride Front Range Express buses to and from work are wired on more than caffeine. Each bus in the 13-vehicle fleet is equipped with Wi-Fi technology that makes it possible for passengers to cruise the Internet.
The ride costs between $2 and $6, depending on riders’ destinations, but the Wi-Fi is free.
The Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments and the city of Colorado Springs partnered with others to start the bus line, and free Wi-Fi has been available since its inaugural run in October.
“The original thought was that this would be a great amenity for commuters to attract riders, and it has done so,” said Larry Tenenholz, general manager of Springs Transit. The company typically has 420 passengers a day, about 25 percent of whom plug in their laptops.
With “Movers, Shakers, Sleepers” as its motto, Front Range Express serves the cities of Fountain, Colorado Springs, Monument, Castle Rock and Denver.
Vacation mangled on land, air and sea
Energy exec Don Anderson has plenty of excitement in his life, with his Denver company, TransMontaigne Inc., preparing to launch a new publicly traded master limited partnership. But Anderson got a little more excitement than he bargained for recently in what was intended to be a relaxing cruise with his kids and grandkids.
For starters, the Anderson clan was supposed to leave April 10, the day of the big blizzard. On April 11, they endured an all-day ordeal, winding through United Airlines’ serpentine waiting lines and arriving at Disney World in Florida at 2:30 a.m.
On their Caribbean voyage aboard Disney’s “Wonder” cruise ship, the vessel was tossed by the same heavy seas that caused injuries to passengers on another cruise ship when a 70-foot wave hit it off the coast of South Carolina.
Coincidentally, TransMontaigne operates a Florida petroleum terminal that fuels the Disney cruise ships, which led Anderson, at TransMontaigne’s recent annual meeting, to cap off his travelogue disaster with this upbeat note on the cruise:
“The fuel worked great.”
Hospitals check into greater IT spending
Nearly two of every three small and medium-size hospitals are dramatically increasing their investments in information technology this year, according to a survey by the Info-Tech Research Group.
The move comes on the heels of an April report by the American Health Information Management Association that found only 17.5 percent of all hospitals were compliant with federal security regulations.
The survey found that 62 percent of the largest hospitals – those with more than 2,000 employees – will invest in security software, and 57 percent will add security hardware to their networks. The top investment areas include storage and telephony.
The survey is based on responses from more than 1,400 IT officials at midsize hospitals in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. As of November, Colorado had 86 licensed hospitals, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Closed churches’ items are born again
Mounting debt has left churches across the country struggling to keep their doors open. That’s where Matt White comes in.
His Barnegat, N.J.-based salvage company Recycling the Past has incorporated a church division into its operations. Should a church be forced to liquidate assets or close entirely, White’s company is there to assure the aging, often irreplaceable artifacts aren’t consigned to the scrap heap.
“We’re the last line of defense,” he said. “I hate to see this stuff get thrown away.”
Many of the items White salvages – stained glass, statuary, wooden doors – are sold to people who find new uses for them.
“A lot of big, bulky stone from these old churches might end up as accoutrements in the garden,” he said.
While money problems are rampant in Denver-area churches, demolition isn’t a threat here yet, assured Nicole Hernandez, preservation coordinator for Historic Denver.
