electric cars to be driven by faculty and staff

UNH faculty and staff have the opportunity to test drive two electric cars, thanks to a number of organizations concerned with the environment, including UNH Energy and Campus Development, the Office of Sustainability, and the UNH Energy Task Force in partnership with Maine Electric Vehicles of Falmouth.

Starting on March 17, the cars, which are called Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, will be driven around campus for two weeks to assess the benefits of adding them to the Clean Fleet Program.

“Neighborhood Electric Vehicles are one potential niche market alternative fuel vehicle that might be useful as part of the UNH-Durham campus fleet,” said Steve Pesci, the Energy and Campus Development project director for special projects.

The vehicles are being loaned by Maine Electric Vehicles of Falmouth to be driven around campus, beginning at the center of campus and going as far as West Edge. The test drives will simulate the 25 mph average low-speed on-campus drive.

“Electric vehicles are quieter, more suited to frequent starting and stopping, and have no tail-pipe emission, which is better for local air quality,” said Brett Pasinella, the program coordinator of the Climate and Biodiversity Education Initiatives and director and chief sustainability officer. “If the electricity is generated with renewable sources, they will have lower greenhouse gas emissions as well.”

Michael Hayes, the vice president of Miles Electric Vehicles Sales, said that in comparison to models he has shown at UNH before, these cars have AC motors which allow for fewer moving currents, longer maintenance intervals, and two to three times more horsepower. —Valerie Cellucci

freshman class outranks other classes in number of police calls

Call logs on record at the UNH Police Department tell an interesting story about the foolish and sometimes darker side of life on campus. There are occasional alcohol violations here, arson and noise complaints there. But nothing stands out more than the trend showing that police calls originate from Stoke Hall, Christensen Hall and Williamson Hall more often than from any other buildings on campus.

These three halls house a significant portion of UNH’s first year students. Christensen and Williamson are nearly 100 percent first-year students, while Stoke Hall consists of nearly 60 to 70 percent first-year students.

According to Mark Rubinstein, vice president for Student and Academic Services, the reason so many calls are generated by the freshmen class is in part due to their unfamiliarity with college life.

“When a student runs into the conduct system, it only happens once,” Rubinstein said. “Repeat offenders are very rare.”

Spanning from the beginning of the spring semester to the end of February, several locations on campus stood out in the call logs. In the case of Stoke Hall, nearly half of the 16 calls originated from suspicions of drug activity, including one that ended in an arrest. The rest of the calls were based on an array of different situations, including criminal mischief and assault. For Christensen Hall, over half of the 15 calls were related to alcohol violations and suspicions of drug use.

Williamson Hall also had a larger number of calls than most of the buildings on campus, but none of them focused on suspicions of drug use like Stoke Hall and Christensen Hall. Instead, many of the calls focused on seemingly random call types, including one alcohol violation call, one criminal mischief call, a single case of arson and one property crime.

According to Rubinstein, there is little to explain the cause for the seemingly hard partying lifestyle in Christensen Hall and Stoke Hall not appearing in Williamson Hall, but fluctuations in where the activity occurs most often is normal.

“If you look at conduct data, what you’ll see from year to year is that we see significant variation (in where calls originate from),” Rubinstein said. “If you look at past years, you can see that kind of variation.”

UNH Police Deputy Chief Paul Dean said that the maturity of the students who call is definitely a factor.

“Freshmen lack maturity sometimes,” Dean said.