Eastern has used 1,000 less gallons of gasoline this year compared to last.

This may sound good, but the rising cost of gasoline in the past five years offsets any savings, said President Lou Hencken.

The president requested that Gary Reed, director of facilities planning and management, form a committee to address the problem.

“We realize this isn’t going to go away,” Hencken said. “There’s only so many dollars to go around, so we have got to look at ways to conserve gasoline.”

The task force on energy and gasoline conservation is the solution.

“I think they’re going to look not only at gas utilization, but also how can we ‘green’ the campus, how can we come to the next step,” Hencken said.

Facilities planning and management has already initiated efforts to conserve campus energy costs related to heating, air-conditioning, recycling and reducing the number of fleet vehicles. The conservation committee will help involve the rest of the campus.

“We like to relate a little better with the campus community on things the individuals can do to help us out on a day by day usage,” said Reed, who is also the committee’s chair.

The idea of the committee is to get people together to talk. Employees know their jobs best and probably will have good ideas on how energy can be conserved at those jobs, Hencken said.

“This will be sort of a sounding board, and then we’ll come back together and hopefully be able to reduce the consumption of gasoline,” he said.

The committee, which has already met once and will meet again today, will look at alternatives as innovative as hybrid cars or as traditional as turning the lights off when a room is unoccupied.

“We’re going to come up with several, I think, great concepts with this committee,” Reed said. “It’s a little early to have any conclusions out of the committee yet. But we do have some regularly schedules meetings and we’ll be giving a summary shortly.”