Apu's epitaph: The old Hungarian who went to Heaven for an Olde English 800

Me, Jennifer and Apu on the final road trip.

Editor's note: I wrote this the morning my father died. It's been some years now. The avowed socialist, anticommunist freedom fighter and Hungarian patriot was a stubborn sort. I still get sentimental thinking about him.

My dad was 71 when he died. He called me one night 2 1/2 years earlier saying the SS (the Shutzstaffel, the Nazi paramilitary corps) were on his doorstep with guns and were going to take him to the camps. My dad, Imre Antal Nemeth, had a Jewish mother and had been hidden in Hungary during World War II. He was raised Catholic and squirreled away with his maternal grandparents in a tiny village on the Croatian border. 

The SS Nazi  soldier reference was my first real clue we had any Jewish heritage. Then his friend Steve a month later called to say I had to do something. Luckily, Jennifer, my daughter, drove from Bellingham, Wash. to Seattle every night and slept over and went back to work (two hours each way). She spent weekends with him, too. She took leave for the final weeks, continuing for five or six. But he had clearly lost his mind. She could no longer distract his crazy plans with a cookie.

He was just months from retiring after decades welding big steel girders for commercial buildings as a union ironworker. Most people called him Red. Nobody could prononce his real name. He gave it to me, too. That's why I'm called Mike.

I flew up to Seattle and in three hours loaded up six boxes of his stuff and told him to get in his little Ford Escape. "You're coming with me," I said. He had been eating rotting meat, had nearly burned his house down and was seeing imaginary people. And he was angry others couldn't see it. He almost killed a woman in a car accident, so Jennifer had taken his keys. He berated her something awful, but she is tough. 

After I got him to Clovis, Calif., where I live, I tried to keep him at my house, but he flew into a rage and tried to beat me up. I stayed up all night the first night after driving 17 hours (he tried to escape once at a gas station). I had to keep him in the house. I put on double locking deadbolts that next day. 

For the first couple of months, he lived OK in assisted care at $1,500 a month. Then he ran off twice, once when it was 107 degrees. He found his way to an Indian casino. We found him a second time confused and sun burned. He had wandered near my house. Three cop agencies were out looking for him. He was the first ever to escape from the facility's memory care center, sneaking out a window and scaling an 8-foot gate. Dogs tracked him for nearly a dozen miles of weird wandering.

Green jobs: Valley Legacy Project releases video on achievements

The Valley Legacy Project is meant to get the San Joaquin Valley's K-12 system, higher education and workforce investment boards working together to better prepare people for occupations with high-growth potential.

Those include agribusiness, biotech, water technology, renewable energy, manufacturing and supply-chain management.

Of course, at the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization, we care most about clean energy. We created a website, www.wiasjvceo.com, that is meant to be a one-stop shop for those looking for jobs or just to find out more about green energy.

The Valley Legacy video was presented at the annual California Partnership for the San Joaquin annual summit Oct. 7 in Bakersfield. It is short but has impact.

The project came about through a coalition of groups and great work from participating students, teachers, WIBs, the private sector and others.

Testimonial: Energy efficiency can be tough (sometimes)

For the past two years, I've been helping cities and counties prepare to install energy efficiency retrofits.

It hasn't been simple. We're working with federal grants with very particular requirements. But the challenge caters to my make-the-world-a-better-place sensibilities.

And we've got a lot of company. Energy efficiency has caught fire in the past couple years. In the corporate world, companies are installing lighting and other electrical retrofits and establishing sustainability policies that revamp manufacturing and distribution practices. Their directive is to cut waste and promote savings of not only but energy but water and other materials.

Building information modeling, which enables designers to drop energy use like a rock, is sweeping the urban construction industry and is threatening to encompass more. Managers have learned to shave significant energy costs by monitoring and adjusting power consumption before construction and during occupancy. New products are coming on light rapidly that allow greater central control and monitoring.

And utilities are reworking their distribution networks by incorporating smart grid technology that offers game-changing savings through broad energy management protocols.

Into the light

Lighting retrofits are possibly the most cost-effective of these measures. And they're much of what I'm in charge of at the San Joaquin Valley Clean Energy Organization. We've also got air conditioning, pumps and other retrofits.

Yet getting our projects installed has not been simple. From my Formica-covered table top in Fresno, I have been working to funnel federal stimulus money into the Valley economy via Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants. It's been a long road. We're finally getting the projects bid, materials purchased and at least some problems resolved.

Some issues still pose difficulties. Because of the relatively low rate of reimbursement offered by the California Energy Commission for the energy efficiency retrofit measures, some of my cities and counties have struggled to find contractors. The small size of some projects haven't helped.

Get 'er done

The state has been working frantically to get jurisdictions finish their projects by the March 14, 2012 deadline. But California Energy Commission project officers can only offer advice and direction -- no extra funds.

I heard one county was able to figure out how to pay for the replacement of air conditioning units on the maximum reimbursement of $1,000 per ton. That's a pretty big deal, by the way. So I gave the woman in charge of the program a call.

She said her county had no magic bullet, just an employee who had spent years in the HVAC trade. The county purchased units from a manufacturer that certified its products as Buy American-ready and installed them itself rather than going to an outside contractor.

Energy savings American style

The SJVCEO wants to maximize the value of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grants my team is administering. When complete, the retrofits would save 5.4 million kilowatt hours of electricity. We want to save all that energy.

However, about four months remain before our deadline to complete the work, and a number of our jurisdictions still need contractors. Many of our cities don't have the staff to do their own retrofits. All have had to make drastic budget cuts because of the economic slide of the past few years.

We discovered almost immediately that because of the reimbursement rates our jurisdictions were having trouble attracting interest even in this down economy. Requests for proposal issued by several cities turned up no interested bidders, while others came in with bids that far exceeded reimbursement costs.

Finding solutions

My boss charged my co-worker Sandy Nax and I to come up with a solution. We followed the formula of using a sole proprietor who has no employees and does all the work himself, thus avoiding Davis Bacon wage rates. But this work is difficult for one person.

Sandy tracked down names using an online contractor search engine and California's Contractors State License Board listings, and I started cold calling.

I eventually called 83 contractors all over the San Joaquin Valley. Three contractors expressed interest in air conditioning retrofits.

I'm hopeful we'll find lighting contractors interested as well. I'm not so sure about pump retrofits, but we all have our fingers crossed.

Nothing's simple with grants

I've been on the phone a lot explaining how the process works. Reimbursement is likely going to be slow, making it tough for contractors already strapped by an unforgiving economy.

I did reach a friendly contractor in Kingsburg who said, "I'm not interested in anything to do with the government." I get that. Seriously, I do. Working within the strict confines of federal grant requirements is enough to make anybody relate to rocker George Thorogood's request for "one bourbon, one scotch and one beer."

Maybe when the job's done. We're determined to make this work.

Photo: Corcoran pump 9A where we have retrofits planned.