I am pleased to see that the NCAR Mesa Lab fountain will be removed, as announced in the President's Council Summary Notes from November 16.
There is a growing concern in the sciences with which I am becoming all too familiar, having attended several workshops and conferences recently. One of the biggest challenges for scientists today is that it is very difficult for couples who are both scientists to find employment in the sciences in the same town.
After NOAA's David Skaggs Research Center was completed and occupied,
our staff with joint appointments or recent transfers noted the indoor
bike storage room there. They asked about arranging the same kind of
facility at the two NCAR campuses. They were assured it was a good
idea, and the space committee would try to find a way to make it happen.
It
has been shocking to watch the utter disregard for environmental impacts during
the current electrical conduit project that has caused considerable damage to
the NCAR Mesa Lab property. Two aspects are particularly troubling:
I've noticed that the lines in the east Foothills Lab parking lot where I often park are rather narrow, making it difficult to park large personal and GSA vehicles there. One consequence of these narrow spaces is that it makes it difficult to get in and out of large vehicles once parked. The lot's layout probably meets whatever minimum regulations apply, but given its appearance, the lot will likely need repainting soon. It would be nice to make the spaces slightly wider, or mark some spaces for smaller vehicles and some for larger.
When the weather is nice outside, the bicycle racks in the CG1 garage and the covered bike parking at FL2 are overflowing with bikes. On some days, bicycle parking is so scarce that people resort to leaning their bikes against the FL2 wall.
Subject: Workplace Accommodations for Nursing Mothers
Along with many other women at UCAR/NCAR, I'm a nursing mother, so I
need to pump breast milk while at work. In the past, there has been
division-allocated space given to nursing women to express milk, but no
NCAR-wide policy. Recently, the room that our division was using for
this was taken away.
The new Official Closures Policy
has created an inconsistency in the application of closure time and
flexiplace. This argues for urging UCAR to make its flexiplace policy
as broad in its application as the new closure time policy is.
I am disappointed that UCAR is offering to pay me for closure hours
rather than having me draw on my quite generous pool of PTO hours while
at the same time denying pay to scheduled casual staff who do not get
benefits. Is there a good reason (for example, federal law) why this is
done?
Inclement Weather Closures (from UCAR Policies and Procedures Section 5-4):
Wireless networks abound in many diverse forms. Most notable are the
plain old wireless networks that many of us have in our homes, along
with the general UCAR-maintained network. These radios operate in an
unlicensed part of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, meaning the
bandwidth has been designated for public consumption with some controls
on the maximum power levels.
