Facing sticker shock, San Francisco on Thursday pushed off the proposed deadline to replace polluting sedans driven around by city employees with zero-emission electric vehicles until 2022.
The initial 2020 deadline proposed in Supervisor Katy Tang’s electric vehicle requirement legislation was seemingly out of reach, according to a report on the proposal by the budget analyst.
The report found it would cost tens of millions of dollars to buy electric cars and install needed charging stations, and require a significant ramp-up in the offloading and purchasing of fleet vehicles.
In addition to changing the deadline Thursday during the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee, Tang also changed the proposal to allow 10 percent of the impacted fleet to be plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, a combination of gasoline and electric, to address concerns over costs and the distance a vehicle can drive before needing to be recharged.
The proposal is only the latest effort to tackle San Francisco’s municipal fleet, which has posed challenges over the years in terms of getting departments to reduce the number of cars they use and to eliminate gas-guzzlers.
Supervisor Norman Yee expressed concerns over the cost. “We are going through all this budget discussion over how tough it’s going to be over the next few years,” Yee said. “It’s a big-ticket item.”
The analysis of the proposal looked at replacing 1,550 sedans in The City fleet, out of the 5,876 total vehicles of all types, and arrived at a cost of $95 million.
But the proposal will only impact a subset of those sedans since it exempts public safety vehicles like the approximately 500 police patrol cars, which run on gasoline. The cost of purchasing 759 vehicles and installing 636 charging stations was estimated at $31 million. That low-end estimate includes the least expensive electric vehicle model, Smart Electric Drive at $27,500, and charging stations at $16,000 apiece.
But Tang argued that while “the analysis for the costs looks really scary,” the cost could be reduced significantly if the fleet is reduced in size and other cost benefits are factored in, such as savings from gas.
Under previous adopted vehicle laws, The City is required to reduce its fleet and also to track usage using telematics technology, devices sometimes called black boxes that track vehicle usage, installed in nearly 4,000 vehicles in the fleet.
Adam Nguyen, finance and planning director for the City Administrator’s Office, which oversees the fleet, said the devices were installed in the required vehicles during the past year and a half, and a report is due out by June 30.
Read more of the original article at The San Francisco Examiner.
