The Board of Trustees approved $8 million in additional bond fundraising in an emergency meeting at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday.

The additional money will be for support costs of the new energy conservation project, which includes the Renewable Energy Center and 23 smaller projects.

The contract with Honeywell Corp. includes monitoring energy savings to verify the university is seeing the cost savings promised in the contract.

“As we’ve been finalizing our negotiations with Honeywell, we did not include in that total cost the support costs that are an important part of this contract,” said William Weber, vice president for business affairs.

The support costs are $400,000 a year for each year of the 20-year contract. The support costs will be used to monitor the performance and verify the operational cost savings of the project.

The project continues to move forward into its third phase, with a final contract expected to be ready by the end of the month.

“When we were in phase two of the energy conservation project, we had the main contract and a separate part for the support costs,” Weber said. “At this time we are going to combine the two into one contract.”

Combining the contracts will not affect the total cost of the project. The lone change is coming in the way the contract is set up.

“This is just a structural change,” Weber said. “There is no change to our original cost analysis. The $8 million has already been included in our cost analysis, but we thought it was going to be separate.”

The exclusion of the support costs from the funding was an oversight.

“When we originally looked at it (at the June meeting), I presented only the construction costs,” Paul McCann, director of business services/treasurer, said. “This was the additional cost to the university of the guarantee.”

The smaller projects included in the plan are building insulation, new windows in residence halls and updates to the chilled water system.

Sarah Ruholl can be reached at 581-7942 or [email protected].