GREECE, N.Y. — State lawmakers may delay the mandate requiring school districts to stop buying new diesel buses by next year and phase them out entirely by 2035. But until that delay is finalized, some districts are finding alternative solutions.
News10NBC Investigative Reporter Jennifer Lewke has been investigating serious concerns that local districts have about cost, infrastructure and reliability of electric bus fleets.
The Greece Central School District is not confident taxpayers would approve purchasing electric school buses, so the district is stockpiling diesel buses instead.
Greece is one of the largest suburban districts in the state. It operates 190 buses that transport more than 10,000 students to 98 different schools and programs every day. Not one of these buses is electric.
“At this point, the scuttle in the community that I’ve been getting is a hard no. The community isn’t ready to support it, they don’t think it’ll work,” Sean McCabe says. “I mean even your pro-climate type people that are supportive of green energy see the inefficiencies a little bit with electric buses over the winter time.”
McCabe is the Greece School Board president. Greece normally replaces about 25 buses per year, but with taxpayer permission, the district has been buying more than it needs.
“25 large diesel buses and 10 small gas buses,” Dave Richardson says. “Like last year, we’re looking to stockpile 10 additional buses as we get closer to the zero emissions mandate.” Richardson is the executive director of student operations for Greece Schools.
The district has a strategy for dealing with the mandate. “There is a waiver program that we could apply for but we’ve chosen to wait until the time that we are required to buy electric buses to request that waiver, so we’ll have the two years at that point to do that,” McCabe says. “We’ve bought extra buses the last few years to replenish our fleet and have some extras to delay buying electric buses because of the uncertainty there has been with electric buses.”
If the state legislature doesn’t approve an overall delay of the electric bus mandate, the district will eventually have to comply. A substation right next door can provide the power needed, but the cost is steep.
“We’re still looking at approximately $30 million in infrastructure upgrades not to mention the buses alone would be approximately $80 million to replace our entire fleet to EV where as if we needed to replace our entire fleet to gas or diesel over the next 10 years, that would only be $30 million,” Richardson explains.
The governor indicated that she expects the state legislature to approve a bill that would delay the electric bus mandates by five years but at the moment, the only other option is to apply for up to two, two-year extensions to the mandate that requires districts stop buying new diesel buses by 2027.
Greece school district doubles down on diesel buses amid uncertainty over state electric bus mandate WHEC.com.
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