PROVIDENCE — Unless lawmakers have other ideas, it looks like state environmental officials will continue to call their current offices at The Foundry complex home.

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management has called The Foundry home for years. The agency rents some 126,000 square feet of office space from Foundry Parcel Fifteen Associates LLC, paying around $2.58 million annually in rent.

The offices at the Foundry host the bulk of the agency’s operations, and around 300 DEM employees, about three-fourths of the agency’s total workforce. The rest have offices elsewhere. Unlike most other state agencies, DEM actually owns a wide portfolio of different properties around the state, despite renting out space for its main office in Providence.

The governor’s budget proposal assumes DEM will continue to rent office space at The Foundry, paying no more than $2.8 million in rent annually going forward. DEM has also proposed lessening the amount of office space it rents to just 115,000 square feet. It would also cut the lease into two separate, five-year increments. Payments for the lease will come out of the agency’s annual budget.

DEM director Terry Gray told lawmakers the agency was looking at optimizing its main office space.

“We have some training rooms, a server room that used to house our computer networks that have now been consolidated elsewhere under the state,” Gray said about the proposed office space cuts. “We’re trying to be efficient and look at how much office space we actually need.”

Gray said the agency was also looking at moving its office configuration from its present setup. The agency’s main goal of moving offices was to concentrate customer service areas onto The Foundry’s second floor, instead of being scattered around the existing building.

What kind of savings DEM could reap from slimmer office space is still up in the air, according to Marxo Schiappa, acting director of the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, the office in state government that manages state properties and leases. Final terms of the new DEM lease have yet to be finalized.

“The final configuration for DEM, those costs haven’t been confirmed with the landlord yet,” Schiappa told lawmakers in a House Finance Committee meeting last week. “We don’t have that portion yet, but we will update these numbers as we get them.”

The past two years saw Gov. Dan McKee, in a bid to reuse 210,000 square feet of office space once used by Citizens Bank in East Providence, proposing moving DEM and the Office of Energy Resources — currently housed in the Department of Administration building on Smith Street — into the same building once the DEM’s Foundry lease expired.

Merging the two agencies at 115 Tripps Lane was aimed at reducing the state’s long-term lease and other capital costs, according to reporting from Rhode Island Current last year. The merger would have cost the state $52 million over five years, breaking even another five years after that. Lawmakers ultimately axed the proposal.

The main Foundry offices aren’t the only office space DEM occupies. While the bulk of the workforce is concentrated in Providence, select other offices are scattered around the state at different properties owned by DEM. Offices include the Parks and Recreation in North Kingstown, the Fish and Wildlife office in the Great Swamp Management Area in South Kingstown, the Coastal Resources office at the Port of Galilee in Narragansett, and the Marine Fisheries office in Jamestown.