Letter from Anthony Scalici

To Oberacker: Please Oppose Bus Mandate

I am a long-time member of the Cooperstown Central School Board of Education but writing this letter as an individual. Please reconsider the mandate for electric school buses placed on public schools. It imposes an impossible burden on annual operating finance, transportation management and long-term debt to taxpayers. It is detrimental to classroom education in the threat it poses of losses to staffing and programs from the inordinate increase to yearly bus and related costs. Spending constraints for rural schools are already harming staff and program viability from existing state regulations and the 2 percent tax-cap.

It can be concluded that this mandate was drawn with little or no input from public school business and administrative professionals as follows:

(1) Bus purchases can only be made, per New York State regulations, as an annual operating expense and the difference in cost of each EV bus is more than $200,000.00 higher than the present cost of a diesel bus, creating an annual budget and tax increase to exceed the 2 percent cap for just two of Cooperstown’s 19-bus fleet;

(2) What is your estimate and plan to pay for (other than local school taxes) the total increase for replacing all public school buses?

(3) Schools have round-trip sports runs that exceed the battery capacity of an EV school bus;

(4) Charging stations do not exist in every school and neither does full debt-free financing to construct them; additionally, there are specific charging specifications and devices have not been standardized for all EV makers;

(5) It is unknown if the state has (or will have) enough power production to enable all the buses in our 700 districts to charge simultaneously.

Then, in addition to these immediate obstacles to New York schools, the following bigger-picture unanswerables remain:

1) How will the future power demand be met when planned mandates of EV cars and commercial vehicles, homes, appliances, and businesses are put in effect, and;

2) When/how will nationwide manufacturing capacity, new power generation, and power distribution for any/all of these ambitions (even for New York alone) be attained?

In summary, where are the short- and long-term financial plans to initiate and sustain this grand vision, and why does it fall so severely on public schools whose taxpayers are already over-burdened by ever-increasing state regulations?
This mandate meets no educational goal for students. Neither is it a strategy or plan, but is a visible guarantee of financial chaos and crippling of public education. Please share these easy-to-understand obstacles with other legislators and correct your miscalculation with erasure of this impossible imposition on local public education. It will be far more sensible to begin with a statewide infrastructure initiative necessary to carry out a large-scale reduced emissions goal by proposing statewide voter proposition/s.

Anthony Scalici
Cooperstown