Push is on for more propane buses
LANSDALE >> 2020 was an outlier year in nearly every way, and those who help get kids to school safely are no exception.
North Penn School Board heard details from 2020 and plans for 2021 from the district transportation department last week, including plans to keep adding propane-fueled buses to the district’s fleet.
“It’s great for everyone. Students love it, the bus is quiet. Drivers love it, because behavior’s not as much of an issue. it’s better for both drivers and students,” said district Coordinator of Transportation Nick Kraynak.
“And it’s better for the environment. I think it’s great for the taxpayers of North Penn, we can reduce our carbon footprint, it’s just a win-win for everybody involved,” he said.
Since late 2018, the district has sought grant money to fund
several rounds of propanefueled school buses, the first of which arrived in May 2019. A second round of grant money in February 2020 went to buy more propane buses that March, bringing the total up to 21 of the district’s fleet of 136 that are “powered by propane,” from a fuel station located adjacent to North Penn High School, and district staff announced the latest round of grant funding during the board’s finance committee meeting on Feb. 9.
Kraynak gave the latest facts and figures to the school board’s finance committee on Feb. 16, detailing how his department is now staffed at 60 full-time, benefit-eligible bus and van drivers, down from 75 just the year before, along with 46 permanent part-time bus drivers and 19 substitute drivers.
“It does help that nobody has any field trips this year, but we did have a large number of unexpected retirements this year, due to the pandemic. That kind of hurt us a little bit, but we were able to bring some of our substitute staff on as permanent part-time drivers,” he said.
Maintaining the district’s fleet are one fulltime mechanic supervisor and four full-time mechanics, with hiring of one more underway, and routes are planned by three full-time routing specialists, one fulltime dispatch supervisors, one secretary and one field trip coordinator.
The district fleet itself now consists of 131 public school vehicles, which transported 11,414 students a total of just ever two million miles in 201920, Kraynak told the board. Those are supplemented by 23 private runs operated by local company First Student and seven more operated by Tropiano, and those two companies serviced a total of 1,595 non-public students, a number Kraynak said was “way down” from 1,800 the year before.
“One thing we’re working to do is bring down the average age of our fleet. At this time last year, it was 12.6 (years old), now it’s down to 10.8 (years old), and we’re hoping to reduce that number even more,” he said.
As of Feb. 16 the district owned 21 propane buses, with nine more on order and scheduled for delivery in March and June, which Kraynak said should bring the fleet up from 18.75 percent to 26.79 percent propane by the end of June. The January grant award has led to a purchase order for seven more buses, and the department is requesting $1 million be included in their 2021-22 budget for further propane bus purchases.
“It’s clean-burning fuel, it saves us money, and I think we can continue to seek out grant funds to help offset those costs,” Kraynak said.
Tracking the department’s expenses year-byyear, costs have stayed “relatively stable” over the past decade, Kraynak told the board, with the biggest jump coming in 2019 with the first round of propane bus purchases. Total transportation department expenses are projected at $13.85 million for 2021-22, “which has us right in that range where we have been,” he said, showing bar charts of those budgets over time, then similarly flat bars with salaries removed.
That jump in spending is most obvious on another slide, showing the past ten years of purchases under the “property” category for the department: small blips under $200,000 in 2011 and 2013, stand next to minimal spending for each other year through 2018, followed by massive jumps to over $1 million in 2019, ‘20 and ‘21.
“About three years ago, we were running some buses that were 19, 20, 21 years old. We still have a couple of buses that are from 1999 on our roster, our fleet of buses now,” Kraynak said.
“There was a lack of investment there, which we witnessed by the age of our fleet. We can see, by investing now, we’re starting to bring down that age,” finance committee chairman Christian Fusco said.
What happens to those older buses as new ones arrive?
“One of the stipulations with the grants we’ve been receiving is that, if we receive the grant, and we buy an alternative fuel vehicle, we have to destroy a diesel engine,” Kraynak said.
“So we take it to the junkyard, they drill a hole in the engine block, and cut the chassis out. It’s pretty fun to watch, at least one time; if you have to do it every day it gets a little old,” he said.
Lowering the average fleet age should help increase the district’s state transportation subsidies, he added, and whenever possible staff have traded in or sold older buses and put the proceeds toward new purchases.
“We’re slowly but surely getting rid of those really old buses. Hopefully, in the next five years, we’ll have a pretty low median age of our fleet, and hopefully they will be mostly propanepowered,” Kraynak said.