Last month’s local school district votes were notable for what was missing from most ballots — propositions to purchase zero-emission school buses. 

Cost may be a factor. Bethlehem Central School District stated that plainly in its budget newsletter: “The district is not planning to add to its fleet of electric school buses in 2025-26 due to uncertainty surrounding the federal grant funding that has made EV buses affordable.” 

It’s easy to blame President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress, but consider this: As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress allocated $5 billion over five years for school bus replacements, money that’s being distributed to all 50 states. Yet in New York alone, the added cost of replacing buses with electric rather than fuel-powered models is estimated to total $9 billion by 2035, based on today’s prices.

In other words: New York is demanding so much, so quickly that school districts may not be able to keep up.

Every school bus on the road must be zero-emission as of July 1, 2035. That may sound far off, but school buses are replaced on an eight- to 12-year cycle, depending on the model and the mileage dictated by a district’s bus routes. It follows that propositions to buy more than a small handful of electric school buses should have been before voters this spring.

But most local school districts that asked taxpayers to purchase student transportation vehicles stuck with fossil-fueled models. A few hedged, proposing to buy mostly diesel- or gas-powered vehicles and one or two electric-powered vehicles. 

For example, in the Shenendehowa Central School District, only two of 20 vehicles taxpayers agreed to purchase were electric. And Shenendehowa made clear to its voters that it had state grants of $220,500 per unit for the Type-C EV buses. But that incentive amount does not cover the entire premium of over $263,000 for those buses — assuming they are available — under this year’s prices. 

One outlier was Guilderland Central School District, where voters approved a proposition to acquire five electric school buses.

Bethlehem may be blaming the feds today for its change of heart, but for its initial electric school bus purchases it relied on limited funds from the Volkswagen legal settlement over its diesel engine pollution violations, and later on the New York School Bus Incentive Program. 

That program provides grants for 60% of the purchase price for a new electric school bus, plus bonuses for priority districts and for scrapping the fossil-fuel vehicle being replaced. Yet New York allocated only $500 million to the program from the environmental bond voters approved in 2022.

And then there are the costs of adding charging infrastructure and upgrading electrical service.

New York’s utilities charge a fee to electricity customers to fund the state’s Electric Vehicle Make-Ready Program, which helps eligible nonresidential customers defray the costs of charging infrastructure.

Yet the available incentives did not stop voters in Scotia-Glenville Central School District from rejecting a $2.6 million proposal for an electric vehicle infrastructure project that the Board of Education presented as tax neutral.

Their reluctance may be rewarded: Absent a fiscal miracle in New York, this spring’s school bus votes are not likely just a bump in the road. They may instead be a dead-end sign for the state’s zero-emission school bus deadlines.

This commentary was originally published in the Times Union of Albany, New York.