The elected school board members of my local school district for starters. Quote from local paper: (Local school district) also took advantage of grants to purchase 10 CNG buses at a discount, but without its own fueling station, fueling the buses became prohibitively expensive, Transportation Director (xxxxx) said. It cost about $1,000 a week to pay drivers for their time to drive the buses to the fueling station in Indio every day, which was higher than fuel savings, she said. The CNG buses will stay parked next school year. “It's just way too expensive right now,” she said. The cost of a CNG powered school bus usually is $40,000 more than a comparible diesel powered bus. [A cost analysis for this buy would be so simple a caveman could do it.]
The sad part is when you have school board members with advanced degrees like MBAs or JDs who make these mistakes. -Matt
Education does not equate to intelligence or common sense which has been proven repeatedly is not that common at all.
The federal government probably put a big grant program for "green" school busses somewhere in that tremendous almost $1 trillion "stimulus" package that Congress pushed through without reading. To some extent, the whole "green" mania is about making symbolic gestures and feeling allegiance to a wonderfully uplifting purpose. People aren't supposed to think dispassionately and analytically about costs, efficiencies and trade-offs. Certainly not when less-idealistic alternatives are dismissed as if they were sin. Unfortunately, despite all the rhetoric about critical thinking, higher education doesn't really innoculate anyone against trendy foolishness. Working in the education world might actually make wooly thinking worse, as generations of campus Marxists have demonstrated pretty conclusively.
The #1 goal of the CVUSD, from their website, is "Maintaining a responsible fiscal budget that involves, and seeks, business and community support." I guess they forgot to seek business support.
