SARATOGA SPRINGS — The Saratoga Springs City School District is expected to spend $1.7 million on buses for the upcoming school year, and the state government’s looming electric bus mandate will likely yield “eye-popping” costs down the road.
At the February 29 Board of Education meeting, Assistant Superintendent for Business Robert “Bobby” Yusko laid out the district’s proposed 2024-2025 bus bond. The purchase is set to include five 66-passenger buses, three 66-passenger buses with luggage compartments, two 35-passenger buses, and one more 25-passenger bus with six wheelchair spots.The total cost will be $1.723 million.
But those figures will likely be dwarfed by the sums needed to transition the district’s entire fleet to electric vehicles, which the district will need to begin doing in 2027. None of the planned 2024-2025 bus purchases will be electric.
“A regular electric bus as we know it today is about $400,000, so it’s eye-popping,” Yusko said. “We also know on top of purchasing the vehicles themselves to the tune of $400,000 a piece, there will be significant capital improvement upgrades that will be required as a result of this mandate.”
Yusko said he was hesitant to provide an estimate of the total costs of converting a fleet of more than 100 buses to zero-emission vehicles because “there’s so much more information we still need to uncover.”
“If nothing happens in Albany in terms of any legislative action,” Yuko said, “this is the letter of the law, and we will have to start doing whatever we can to make that transition.”
