NORMAN — Most people know the NCED Conference Center & Hotel at Highway 9 and 24th Street in Norman is owned by the U.S. Postal Service. Many also know it is managed by Marriott. What may be news is that NCED Conference Center is the largest hotel in the state, likely the greenest hotel in the state and open to the public.
The National Center for Employee Development (NCED) once focused on USPS training. Postal employees from across the nation would fly or drive into Oklahoma to take extended training classes in maintenance, mechanical and technology. Students at the Center enjoyed the comfort of staying at the hotel, swimming in the Olympic- sized pool and making use of the 60,000 square-foot fitness facility when not in class or studying.
Most of the time the center was full with those students wanting to spend money in the local economy, but times have changed.
A trend toward remote or distance learning through computer-aided classes along with a decrease in the amount of training USPS is doing these days has greatly reduced the number of postal students attending in residence at the Norman facility.
That change has opened up the Center up to host a wide variety of conferences and other events from the annual Norman Chocolate Festival to family reunions, weddings, banquets, religious retreats and more. Businesses can arrange for team building work on the center’s ropes course.
In addition, businesses and governmental agencies can book employee training at the self-contained learning center. Classes include automotive, building maintenance, environmental, information technology, management skills, material handling and business mail.
About half of the 964-room facility is available to the public.
“A group can come here and know up front what it’s going to cost them,” General Manager Yves Badaroux said. “We can really deliver a great meeting experience.”
That’s because the conference center has “no surprise” package prices that include hotel rooms, three meals a day, meeting space, coffee breaks and audio-visual support.
The Center is also an Energy Star hotel and has been recognized by the state with several “green” awards for recycling and other environmentally friendly efforts.
“We’ve been doing that for a long time,” Badaroux said of the Energy Star recognition. “I don’t know if there’s another one in Oklahoma.”
The hotel “recycles everything” and has the technology and training to drastically reduce energy consumption.
“We have become very good at saving energy,” Badaroux said.
The hotel has an energy management system that can be scheduled to operated heating, cooling and lighting as needed. There are also sensors in the rooms with intelligent technology to control temperature and energy use.
“If a guest is not checked into the room, the system allows for a larger variance in temperature,” Badaroux said.
The hotel’s laundry system uses ozone, not hot water, to disinfect and clean linens.
“That’s a huge savings because we don’t have to heat the water,” Badaroux said. “And we can use fewer chemicals.”
The process is less harsh on the laundry, prolonging the life of linens for even greater savings.
Three of the hotel’s shuttles operate on CNG fuel instead of gasoline, and the pool does not use chlorine. There are also two outdoor hot tubs that use saline instead of chlorine.
“We believe it is the largest salt water pool in Oklahoma,” he said.
In the area of food services, the hotel has also gone green, eliminating plastic water bottles. Glass bottles are reused and filled with water filtered on site through a filtration system that uses UV light. Badaroux said this has eliminated 80,000 plastic bottles a year.
Recycling efforts allow the Center employees who live outside a city recycling service area to bring recyclables to work. In addition to traditional recycling, food scraps are recycled to a local animal shelter.
The green effort is also local. The Center grows fresh herbs in the south courtyard and buys fresh produce from Peach Crest Farms.
Sometimes recycling and reuse come in a variety of forms. It’s not uncommon for tables or other accouterments to be made in-house at the Center. In one case, old out-dated picture frames were reused for an estimated $45,000 savings.
The old pictures were tossed, and the matting and frames were painted. Photos of local sites were printed in black and white, creating new art and a new look to go with the refurbished frames.
The Center also now offers a course on going green through the center for businesses.
“Along with teaching it, we’re living it,” Badaroux said.
Joy Hampton 366-3539 jhampton@ normantranscript.com
