One Bethel gym burns through $419,000 a year in energy. An audit says it doesn't have to.

It costs a small fortune to keep the lights on and the heat running in Bethel. Just how much came into focus this week, when an energy audit landed before the city's Parks and Recreation Committee: the YK Fitness Center spends more than $419,000 a year on energy — and 83 percent of that is heating oil, burned at $5.77 a gallon. For a single community building off the road system, in a Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where fuel arrives by barge and plane, that's the everyday math of staying warm.

The striking part is how much of that bill is avoidable, and how cheaply. The audit, done by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy, found 20 ways to cut energy use — and figured that spending about $36,000 on all of them would save the city roughly $51,000 a year. That's a payback of under a year.

The two biggest savings cost almost nothing. One is simply reprogramming the building's automated systems to run on the hours the center is actually open, instead of around the clock; the other is tuning its heat-recovery settings to pull more warmth from the humid air leaving the pool. Some of the cheapest money the city could save is sitting in a thermostat.

The audit came before the same committee overseeing an expansion of the adjacent YK Community Center — a reminder that in rural Alaska, building a facility is only half the challenge. Keeping it running is the other.