Gov. Kathy Hochul is pictured signing documentation this week as she presided over state’s Electoral College proceedings. Hochul recently signed legislation that will change the way electric school buses are amortized because they aren’t expected to last as long as originally projected.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has signed legislation that will increase the yearly cost of electric school buses – but doesn’t otherwise change the state’s electric school bus policies.

The state Assembly passed legislation (A.9238) in late May that changes the date of amortization from 12 years to eight years for the electric buses, a move lawmakers say will allow school districts to account for the shorter-than-anticipated useful life of the new buses. It also passed the state Senate in the waning days of this year’s legislative session before its signature last week by Hochul.

When the state Legislature passed legislation requiring school districts to begin adding electric school buses to their fleets, the bill allowed school districts 12 years rather than eight years to pay for the electric buses. The additional term was a way to keep the yearly costs down for the more expensive buses. But, electric school buses can’t be rust proofed without voiding their warranties – meaning the buses aren’t likely to last longer than 10 years, leaving school districts paying for buses that were no longer in service.

The bill passed overwhelmingly, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of discussion. Assemblyman Andrew Goodell, R-Jamestown, was among the 135 votes in favor of the bill, but the retiring Republican said the bill should prompt a bigger discussion about electric buses.

“If we want to address global warming, what we should do is send less money to the world’s largest polluter and use those funds instead in a wise manner to have an impact here and reward those who are making a difference here instead of supporting the world’s largest polluter,” Goodell said. “Sadly that’s a little bit of a different story, so I’m supporting this bill, which involves the planning. But we should take a look at the large picture at some point.”

Earlier this year, Republicans in the Senate and Assembly called on Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature’s Democratic majorities to pause the 2027 statewide implementation of the electric school bus mandate to allow for the completion of a pilot program, cost-benefit analysis and other feasibility assessments. The electric school bus mandate, enacted in 2022, requires new school bus purchases to be zero emission by 2027 and all school buses in operation to be electric by 2035.

State Sen. George Borrello, R-Sunset Bay, has introduced legislation (S.8467) that would rescind the 2027 electric school bus mandate and replace it with a state-funded pilot program that would allow schools to test how these buses perform. A condition of the pilot program is that buses be sited in all three types of settings, rural, urban and suburban, so that their performance can be evaluated. At the end of one year, a report on the program would be presented to the executive and legislature.

School districts are all working to meet the state requirement. Clymer Central School Board of Education members last week discussed a study by National Grid that showed some of the complications for small school districts. Clymer’s study looked at bus routes for the district, identifying two routes that need to be changed because they would be too many miles for the electric buses to be able to run on one charge. Beth Olson, district superintendent, said the report found six of the eight district bus runs will need a charge midday in order for the buses to be able to complete their runs again in the afternoon.

The study only included transportation to and from school and didn’t include extracurricular bus runs or BOCES trips that will require finding time in the day to charge again for the bus to be able to go back out later in the day. Clymer, Panama and Sherman officials were meeting this week to consider a collective study to see if there was any efficiency that would be gained by merging the three transportation departments for the electric bus initiative.

“I’m curious to see where that’s going to go or what that’s going to look like, because our particular report is very Clymer focused,” Olson said. “I don’t see how they’re going to be able to merge the information from the three without doing an additional step such as if you use some type of routing software that puts all of our district routes in there, then we can see where the overlap is and then you may even be able to consolidate a run or do something along those lines.”