Electric school buses are not out of reach
Volunteerism continues to decline in upstate New York
North Country Public Radio continues to provide important and essential in-depth reporting on rural communities throughout the North Country.
On March 28, NCPR reporter Amy Feiereisel did a deep dive on the impact that fewer volunteers is having on volunteer fire departments. She followed that up with a look at how schools are dealing with the state mandate to electrify all school buses by 2035.
Both are important stories you should read.
The electric bus issue is fascinating for the way school districts have addressed the issue from opposite ends of the spectrum and you can't help but wonder if it has its roots in politics. Some superintendents have joined Republican lawmakers in actively opposing the new standard and have done little to address it.
The Republicans in the Legislature have actively tried to delay implementation of the mandate or to repeal it outright.
Back in February, Sen. Dan Stec said in a press conference that the bus mandate was unfeasible and that an electric school bus was two to three times more expensive than a diesel school bus.
Feiereisel's reporting found that was not necessarily the case. She discovered the Alexandria Bay Central School District, a small district on the St. Lawrence Seaway, has already added two electric buses to its fleet of 14 buses. Granted, it took school officials a year and a half of work to get there, but it proved it could be done. Alexandria Bay is just one of a handful of North Country districts to move ahead with electric buses.
The Lake Placid School District has taken a different approach. It is ignoring the mandate.
Assistant Superintendent for Business Dana Wood told Feiereisel the technology is not available and pointed out that electric buses did not have the range to make the long bus trips needed for sports events. He also said that electric buses cost twice as much as diesel buses. But when asked about the available grant money to lower the cost, Wood dismissed that avenue saying they would rather keep buying regular buses until they have to.
Feiereisel reported there has already been three rounds of grant money released by the EPA which pays for about two-thirds of the cost of an electric bus which often makes electric buses cheaper.
Unfortunately, few North Country districts have applied for the grant money.
Stec told Feiereisel that most of the districts he represents are approaching the electric bus requirement the way Lake Placid has.
Stec said the mandate is a "burden" on the rural district. Then Stec said something curious.
"Just because you're asking questions and saying, `Hey, I want to make sure that the math works and that we're doing the right thing here,' does not mean that you are a climate change denier or that you don't love the environment. It's that you respect the safety of school kids and the value of taxpayers money."
It left open the question of whether Stec is a climate change denier.
But Feiereisel addresses the student safety question as well.
The state reports that electric buses improve health of kids because gasoline buses emit pollutants and are far noisier than electric buses.
Anyone who has had the privilege of following a Queensbury bus on Aviation Road late in the afternoon knows full well about the pollutants and noise of diesel buses.
As far as the technology, the state reports the average bus route in the state is about 80 miles a day. Stec said the largest school district in his district, Saranac Lake, is about 100 miles a day. But the electric buses being sold now go between 100 and 200 miles a day on a charge without factoring in a midday charge between runs.
None of this takes into account improvements in technology over the next 11 years.
Feiereisel talked with Adam Ruder, the Director of NYSERDA's Clean Transportation Group, who is overseeing the electric bus transportation for the state.
"School bus fleets don't turn over in a year," Ruder told her. "What we want people to start doing now is doing a study, figuring out a plan and then we think it's a good idea for schools to start buying a bus or two so that you're not starting from zero in 2027."
Of course, there are even more savings to be added with the elimination of the cost of diesel gas use.
In other words, despite the naysayers, electric school buses do seem possible and might even be preferable for saving taxpayers money.
Sen. Stec and the rest of the Republicans should read the NCPR reporting.
Volunteerism
In Feiereisel's other story, she chronicles the continued struggle to recruit volunteers for fire departments as small rural communities continue to age.
NCPR reported that Saranac Lake's fire department had about 65 members in the late 1980s. It now has 35.
New York state says that 75 percent of volunteer fire departments report a decrease in the numbers while seeing an increase in the number of calls.
The concern is that in the very near future, there will be a need for some sort of paid fire department.
Most of us pay a few hundred dollars for fire protection on our county taxes. If departments become paid, that number will increase dramatically. According to one financial impact study cited by NCPR, the volunteers save state taxpayers some $3 billion a year.
The state continues to look at training and stipend for the volunteers as well.
It is a problem that is not going away.
Stefanik fundraising
If you wonder what Rep. Elise Stefanik has been up to lately, it appears she has been doing a lot of fundraising.
After raising over $5 million to end the year, she added another $7.1 million in campaign contributions in the first quarter of this year.
If only that money could be used to help her district.
Chapman donations
We had another Christmas tree gift for the Chapman Museum decorating this year.
We also had a variety of ornaments and another smaller four foot tree that is also pre-lit.
Our monetary donations are up to $350. We are hoping to raise $1,000 for Christmas decorations this year.
If you have Christmas decorations you'd like to donate, email me at tingleykenneth4@gmail.com.
Monetary donations can be made on the Chapman Museum website. Make sure to note the donations is for Christmas donations.
People often make bad financial decisions. They fail to calculate the operating costs into the cost of purchase.
Voting for Dan Stec is expensive. You get him at the same cost as any other state Senator but the return on investment is low and the cost of operation is very high. His decisions are bad and his connections to the supply of power in Albany is weak.
He’s like an old vacuum cleaner the designers made extra loud so you felt like it really sucked. And it did really suck but it had little power to function.
Think of it this way, every time you get a franked mailer from Dan Stec it cost about the same as the end cost of one of those electric school buses in Alexandria Bay.
The decline in volunteerism is a national problem across all sectors. Formal volunteering has fallen dramatically since COVID, but it was in decline for a long time. COVID hammered it, though. I run a nonprofit free tax program (VITA, Volunteer Income Tax Assistance). I had over 100 volunteers in 2019, down to 40 this filing season). The COVID hit is short term, I think, but folks who research the nonprofit sector have noted longer trends.
We Americans have always been this interesting combination of individualism mixed with a commitment to the common good. Volunteerism was embedded in our DNA. Since before the country's founding, every time we see an issue, we create an association, whether it is a volunteer fire department, an aid program for immigrants (that's how Legal Aid got its start 150 years ago; German-Americans helping recent immigrants from the old country) programs to support youth, funeral/burial charities, hospitals, programs for servicemen and women. The Knights of Columbus became popular through operating clubhouses for Doughboys in training camps during World War One.
The decline in volunteerism goes hand in hand, I think, with individualism taking first place over our responsibility to the common good. The Atlantic had an article a few years back where the author discussed how the decline in associations harms our democracy. How do we learn to make collective decisions? To work amicably with people we might not agree with? Through our garden clubs and scout troops and civic associations and faith communities and the other organizations where we need to make group decisions. I don't think we have really understood the broader impact the decline in volunteerism will have on our culture.