The two biggest energy consumers in Kent sit at opposite ends of the conservation spectrum. Kent State has a program well underway to conserve energy on campus, while the city of Kent is still trying to move from ideas to implementation.

Kent Environmental Council hosted a meeting last night that brought out Kent’s city manager, Dave Ruller, and Tom Euclide, Kent State’s director of architecture and engineering, to address their respective institutions’ conservation efforts.

According to Euclide, Kent State is a leader in Ohio in conservation facility management systems, but the environmental decisions still have to answer to the bottom line.

“If any particular project shows a payback within five to seven years, the administration has shown that it will fund those, and pay back the funding through the energy conservation,” Euclide said.

Ruller stressed that the city does have an environmental council, but that a movement will be made to transition “from good ideas to practice” in city government.

“One thing we are lacking is focus,” Ruller said. “We have talked internally about energy audits.”

Ruller mentioned the possibility of some capital projects and retro-fitting on older buildings to make them more environmentally friendly. But overall there has been a lack of effort to “institutionalize plans for environmental energy conservation” by the city, Ruller said. That is an area that he plans to address with city council in the future.

“We can’t be everything to everyone,” Ruller said. “We have to pick a few plans and focus on them.”

Kent State has $11 million budgeted for energy per year. That budget has allowed for the installation of low-flow water fixtures, motion detectors and solar sensors along with the transition from a coal-burning power plant to high-efficiency, gas burning plants around campus. One of the next items on the conservation agenda for Kent State is a plan to reuse building exhaust.

“We have been looking at ways to recover the heat that is exhausted out of our laboratories,” Euclide said. “We look for a way to capture that heat and put it back into the building.”

Hybrid vehicles are not on the horizon for Kent State, according to Euclide. He cited the Kent State staff’s lack of training to maintain such vehicles as the reason the university will not make the switch anytime soon.

Both Ruller and Euclide stressed that the future goals of conservation tend to revolve around sustainability, meaning that the reduction of energy bills will pay for the improvements made by the city and university. The hope of the environmental council is that last night’s meeting will bring together Kent State and the city of Kent to foster an environment of cooperation in conserving energy.

Contact public affairs reporter Brian Andrasak at [email protected].