The state of California has awarded a half-billion dollars to school districts and educational agencies across the state to help add 1,000 zero-emission school buses and chargers — with a portion of that money going to 12 districts in San Diego County.
The largest recipient will be San Diego Unified School District, which will receive funding for 50 school buses and associated charging infrastructure, according to the California Air Resources Board.
“We’re very pleased,” said Gene Robinson, director of transportation and distribution services for San Diego Unified. “Just because of budget constraints, we had not been able to acquire any buses since 2010. We have a lot of buses that were vintage 1996 with several hundred thousand miles on them, so the timing is right for us.”
The funding is part of the state’s Zero-Emissions School Bus and Infrastructure project known as ZESBI that will distribute $500 million to 133 school districts and agencies across the state. The money comes out of the state’s general fund.
Here are the San Diego County recipients:
School districts are not simply given the zero-emission buses. Rather, they receive up to $375,000 to purchase them on their own and up to $95,000 to install associated charging infrastructure. Awardees are required to scrap an existing internal combustion engine-powered bus for every new zero-emission bus they purchase.
In California, all bus purchases by school districts need to be zero-emission by 2035 — although there is an extension until 2045 for educational agencies (mostly rural) that serve fewer than 600 students or with a population density of fewer than 10 persons per square mile.
“California is paving the way to a cleaner, healthier future by investing in zero-emission vehicles across the state,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement, adding, “we’re proving that clean transportation is here to stay.”
San Diego Unified, which is the second-largest school district in California with nearly 100,000 students, currently has 13 electric school buses in its fleet. In addition to its allocation of 50 buses from the state, the district recently received a separate grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to buy 30 all-electric buses.
“So when we get down the road a couple of years, we could be looking at having close to 100 EV buses in our fleet,” Robinson said.
Senate Bill 114, a trailer bill ed in the fall of 2023 and signed into law, allocated $500 million for ZESBI grants, with $375 million specifically for purchasing zero-emission school buses and $125 million for infrastructure and associated cost incentives.
“That’s a lot of money,” said Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank based in Los Angeles that advocates free market solutions to public policy issues. “We have budget constraints, scarce number of dollars that can be used on education, and (for) pupil transportation in particular.”
But Scribner did not dismiss the project out of hand.
“Electric buses do have, in theory anyway, lower maintenance costs and lower operating costs because the electricity (they run on) is cheaper than diesel fuel per mile, and on the operating side, those could be real benefits if they’re realized,” he said. “And of course, you have the externality issues as well (because) you don’t have diesel exhaust and things like that.”
Bradley Branan, spokesperson for the Air Resources Board, said the project “will help the state meet important environmental and public health goals” and pointed out that $1.5 billion was originally earmarked for the 2022-23 fiscal year but was pared down to $500 million due to budget concerns.
To date, California has provided more than $1.3 billion in incentives to school districts to fund more than 2,300 zero-emission school buses, of which about 1,100 are in already on the roads.
About 98% of educational agencies in the ZESBI program serve low-income or disadvantaged communities.
“Cleaning up the state’s school bus fleet is central to California’s efforts to provide clean transportation in priority communities that are disproportionately hurt by air pollution,” Air Resources Board chair Liane Randolph said.
The zero-emission school buses funded by the state are expected to reduce 18,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year — the equivalent of taking more than 4,000 cars off the road.
