By John DeFore

Joining the existing array of programs addressing school bus pollution this fall (the EPA’s Clean School Bus USA, for example) is a new effort bringing the Texas Parent Teacher Association together with the state’s Commission on Environmental Quality.

The project, announced earlier this month, will supply funds to the PTA for bus pollution-control improvements. In a nice “let the punishment fit the crime” twist, those funds are coming from fines assessed to polluters, and will generally be used near the site of the pollution that provoked the fine.

That’s because this is one of TCEQ’s “Supplemental Environmental Projects”, in which (as the commission’s web site puts it) “a respondent in an enforcement matter can choose to invest penalty dollars in improving the environment, rather than paying into the Texas General Revenue Fund.”

Andrea Morrow, a TCEQ spokesperson, says that “funds in this program can be used to retrofit buses that are over 5 years old with control technologies approved by EPA or the California Air Resources Board to reduce particulate matter, hydrocarbon emissions and, where possible, emissions of nitrogen oxides.” School districts whose buses were made before 1991 will have the option of scrapping them and replacing them with 2007 or newer models. That swap-out, TCEQ says, would result in “a reduction in particulate matter emissions of up to 90 percent or more.”

The amount of money available to the PTA has a cap of $5 million per year, which only sounds like a lot until you consider an assertion on the informational page of the Clean School Bus Program that a third of Texas’s school buses are over a decade old, and therefore have plenty of room for improvement.

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