$20M a Year ADDITIONAL Cost from "Budget Neutral" @mcps @mocoboe Electric Bus Scheme

This blog post is just a guess because MCPS has no budget analysis to support their claim that the electric school bus scheme they entered into in 2021 is actually budget neutral.

For our analysis we assume that one electric school bus equals one diesel bus.  

We also eliminated all costs in the MCPS Department of Transportation budget on the assumption that all of those costs relate to diesel school buses.  

In place of all of the existing supply, material and equipment costs we substituted the annual lease payment that the Board of Education would be making to HET MCPS, LLC if the entire MCPS school bus fleet was converted to electric school buses at once.  

We used the FY 2021 MCPS Budget Request because that would be the last year that MCPS planned for an all diesel school bus fleet.  

In the recently released Montgomery County Inspector General Memorandum of Investigation the public learned that the annual lease payment for each electric school bus is $38,500.  

We multiplied the annual lease payment by the number of diesel school buses in the FY 2021 budget.  We then substituted that number for all of the MCPS Transportation department costs.  The annual lease payments for 1,378 electric school buses would be $53,053,000.  Adding that number to the cost of Salaries, Wages and Contractual services in the FY 2021 budget totals $137,609,362, which is a 17.2% increase over the funds budgeted in the FY 2021 budget for MCPS Transportation. 

If someone from MCPS or the Board of Education would like to finally explain how the MCPS "budget neutral" scheme is actually going to be budget neutral, we would appreciate hearing from them ASAP.