With the city council’s goal of sustainability as encouragement, city staff has researched money savings that might be obtained by using alternative forms of transportation for city vehicles.

   Scott Simonton, who is the city’s fleet services manager, said “with a little bit of each, we are able to experiment and get our own real world data on this.” He added that “the CNG data we have gathered I have heard everything under the sun of what it costs or what it doesn’t cost … I think it would be in our best interest to see for ourselves with a like-to-like comparison.”

   Simonton is investigating the cost of replacing some of the older South Metro Area Regional Transportation buses with compressed natural gas. He’s also looking into the use of an all-electric bus for one route. SMART contracted director Cynthia Thompson said she’s looking at the proposal as a “pilot project” to determine the feasibility of alternative fuels in the SMART fleet.

   After a visit to St. Helens, Simonton wrote in a staff report that he was “impressed with the simplicity and small footprint of the fueling equipment.” So impressed that he had the builder of the station inspect SMART’s current facility at Elligsen Road where the city received a bid for USD 33.000 to duplicate the St. Helens operation.

   In his first step, Simonton would replace two of the smaller SMART busses with similar CNG buses. The new CNG buses cost about USD 20.000 more than their diesel-fueled counterparts, he said.

   “We would buy these two small buses,” he told the city council. “We have two brand new from last year that are identical buses other than the fuel source. It would really give us a good opportunity to make apples-to-apples comparisons as to operational costs and what kind of costs savings we would expect if we were to expand that into a larger programs with natural gas.”