Hybrid auto fleet is but one of several of LNB's “green” approaches to banking

By María Eugenia Guerra

The Laredo National Bank has replaced a half dozen SUVs and trucks in use for deliveries across town with six high efficiency Honda Civic hybrids. The decision to buy the fleet of environmentally friendly fuel savers came about after LNB CEO Gary Jacobs drove one for six months, concluding, he said, “that we really did not need big heavy trucks to move people and paper.”

“I had heard about the Honda hybrid from Hank Sames a few years ago, I bought one and I loved the drive. It had the feel of a real motorcar and got at least 45 miles to the gallon. It was a wonderful surprise,” he said, adding that the vehicle offers plenty of acceleration.

According to Jacobs, “You learn to drive with a lighter foot. When you need more power, it's there. An indicator light on the dash tells you when the electric power is working and when both are working, which depends on the power demand from going up hills or from the pressure of your foot on the accelerator.”

Jacobs noted that the hybrid has two modes, “economy and normal. When you stop at a light or a stop sign, the gasoline motor automatically shuts off. It is so quiet when you stop that you cannot hear it running. You are actually saving energy at a stop. When you take your foot from the brake to the accelerator, the electric motor starts the gasoline motor automatically and both motors are available.”

Asked about making a business decision that benefits the company as well as the environment, Jacobs said, “It was the right thing to do. I feel really good individually and as a business that we can protect both the environment and our energy supply.” The choice to go hybrid, Jacobs said, was “a no-brainer. These are very clean vehicles as the electric motor is completely clean and the internal combustion gasoline engine is very efficient. Its tiny size makes it a green proposition.”

On a global scale, the banker said, “For decades the United States has had a ridiculous policy on supplies of oil to refine for fuel for American cars. My personal view is that we are stupid as a free society to transfer our hard-earned dollars to dictators in the Middle East who use our money to teach hatred of the U.S. to their young people and to finance terror against Judeo/Christian society.

“If I had a magic wand,” Jacobs continued, “I would stop launching rockets into space and take the NASA budget and NASA scientists and give them a mission to develop alternative fuel systems for U.S. cars and trucks. That mission is not really rocket science, but it is long overdue and it would reduce our dependency on Middle Eastern oil. We don't need their oil -- we need to dedicate sufficient resources to make the U.S. the energy-independent nation it once was.”

The fuel-efficient vehicles are not the Laredo National Bank's first foray into environmental conservation. One has its roots on the river banks and the other has its roots downtown in the bank's efforts to save the old Plaza Hotel and retrofit it to the bank's needs for office space.

In early 1998 LNB gave the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) the funds to sue the federal government to stop the Department of Defense Joint Task Force Six from building a Border Patrol river road that destroyed valuable riparian habitat between downtown and the area just north of Laredo Community College .

“We believed that a more controlled project would give the Border Patrol river access without the kind of erosion that quickly evidenced itself along that stretch,” Jacobs said. MALDEF did not prevail in federal court and the JTF-6 project continued. Floodwaters in the summer of 1998 dumped much of the Border Patrol's caliche road into the Río Grande . “There were better ways to give the Border Patrol access and safety on the river banks, without such a cost to the environment,” Jacobs said.

In the course of its expansions locally and in Texas , whenever possible, LNB will go the route of saving and using an old building and reconfiguring it into a bank branch building. “Old buildings have a special history and character and so we like to save them, restore them, or modify them to a longer term of use,” Jacobs said of the bank's ongoing expansion in and away from Laredo. “It is wasteful to tear down something that still has utility, and in the case of the old Plaza Hotel downtown, we saved a landmark that had much meaning to this city,” Jacobs said of the ten-story building. “We need to get out of the habit of waste. The Plaza Hotel tower has far more meaning and utility in its current state than if it had been razed to build a modern bus station in its place. Willie Cavazos, the architect for the reworking of the Plaza, made the old work like new without destruction. Our investment in the Plaza offered leverage for an Urban Development Action Grant so that the city could restore the old downtown market into what is now the Laredo Center for the Arts, a project for which Willie was also the architect,” Jacobs said.