Green vehicle grants awarded
School district to buy propane buses; Lansdale Borough plans for electric cars
LANSDALE >> Recent state grant awards could mean green additions to the fleets of the North Penn School District and Lansdale Borough.
District Director of Business Administration Steve Skrocki announced on Nov. 26 that North Penn has received two state grants to help pay for adding a different type of school bus to the district’s fleet.
“The first piece is actually for the purchase of school buses, propane school buses, and the grant provides for the differential; the difference between a propane engine and a diesel engine is about $8,000,” Skrocki said.
“We’re not going to receive the cost for the entire bus, just that piece for the markup of the engine,” Skrocki said.
The first grant, awarded by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection under its Alternative Fuels Incentive Grants (AFIG) Program, provides $300,000 to cover the engine costs for 10 new school buses and conversion of 16 additional buses to use propane fuel, Skrocki told the school board during its Nov. 26 finance committee
meting.
A second grant award announced by DEP at the same time gives North Penn an additional $155,302 to construct a propane fueling station for that fleet, which Skrocki said will likely be located somewhere in the district transportation complex behind North Penn High School.
“At first, we thought it was a $300,000 total grant. It’s actually two grants: one for $300,000 and one for $155,000,
so it’s $455,000 in total grants,” he said.
North Penn has also applied for additional grant funding available under a fine issued to automaker Volkswagen several years ago for falsifying vehicle emissions tests, Skrocki told the board, and each state has been allocated certain funding from the Volkswagen settlement to disburse in similar grants.
“The only problem is, you can’t receive both grants” from the Volkswagen settlement or from
DEP, Skrocki told the board, “so whatever grant is more lucrative is the one we’ll accept.”
North Penn’s 2018-19 budget included funding for the purchase of 10 diesel school buses, Skrocki said, so staff are currently developing specifications for buses with propane engine systems and will likely publish a bid package for those and for the fueling station in January, he said.
Depending on the bid results, the district could
apply the grant funding to purchase additional buses beyond the 10 included in the 2018-19 budget, Skrocki said, and the costs for creating a propane fuel station should be fully covered by that portion of the grant funding.
Lansdale Borough received a similar grant earlier in November when the DEP announced a total of $2.6 million in grant awards to municipalities under the same Alternative Fuels Incentive Grants (AFIG) Program.
According to the DEP, Lansdale’s award was $22,500 to put toward the purchase of three electric vehicles, and Borough Manager John Ernst said the borough’s grant funding will likely go toward vehicles for the town’s electric department and will almost certainly be sedan-type vehicles or small SUVs and not heavy trucks.
“We know that over the next couple of years, we need to buy replacement vehicles. This grant allows us to buy electric vehicles, as those become available to us,” he said.
As those vehicle purchases are assessed, Ernst said, the borough will also look into whether electric vehicle charging stations are necessary at borough buildings and/or should be required by developers bringing new projects to town.
“We will look at the long-range fleet plan to assess the impact to the budget over the next few years and determine if any revisions are necessary to take advantage of this grant,” Ernst said.
North Penn’s school board next meets at 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 3 at the district Educational Services Center, 401 E. Hancock St.; for more information, visit NPenn.org.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 9 p.m. on Dec. 5, with various committees starting at 7 p.m., all at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine St. For more information, visit Lansdale.org.