Madison To Get Two Busses Due To Stimulus Funds

Posted on Friday, August 7, 2009

Madison school children will have an additional new bus to ride around in this fall after the Madison Central School District received economic stimulus money this week for the replacement of older diesel buses. Cindy Callies, district business manager, submitted a grant application in June for financial assistance to the Stimulus EPA Clean Diesel Grant Program to replace a diesel bus with multiple engine problems. The state Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced on Wednesday that Madison would receive $74,000 to purchase a new diesel vehicle. that is the entire cost of a new bus.

The school board had already approved the purchase of one new bus for the 2009-10 school year. Now the school district will have two new diesel vehicles. The school district is usually restricted to purchasing one new school bus each year.

The stimulus grant money allows the district to retire a 1998 59-passenger International bus with ongoing mechanical problems. The grant requires that mechanics decommission the old diesel engine by making it inoperable.

The school district is now able to purchase two 2010 model vehicles from IC Bus.

State officials awarded bus-purchase grants to 14 South Dakota school districts, amounting to about $1 million.

To receive the grant funds, the school districts must show that one of their existing diesel school buses with no emission controls was replaced with a new bus that has emission controls. They must also demonstrate that the old bus was scrapped or disabled within 60 days, the new bus is in operation by August 2010, and the new vehicle meets or exceeds the EPA's 2007 diesel engine emission standards.

DENR officials will hold another round of program funding this fall for school districts so that schools can either replace old buses or retrofit emission controls on newer buses. The DENR will announce the application deadlines in the coming weeks.