Thursday, March 28, 2024

Cascade school buses now on good path for replacement

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Cascade School District Transportation Director, Tim Bentz, said for several years he had been requesting the school district buy a new bus every year. At the Feb. 26 Cascade School Board meeting, Bentz thanked the board for finally doing this.
The school district has a fleet of 25 buses.
“You can imagine if we don’t buy a new bus every year, and we haven’t traditionally in this district bought a new bus every year,” Bentz said. “Sometimes we have buses that were 30 years old. That is really old. Imagine your vehicles, unless they are classics, being 25-30 years old. You’re still patching them together and keeping them going. That is what we’ve done.”
Bentz said buying a new bus every year will help immensely over the life of the fleet. The year he joined the district, Bentz said the district bought five buses, which is great. The problem is those buses all go off the depreciation cycle at the same time.
“Then, they cease generating dollars for us when they all go depreciation schedule. That is one problem with buying a whole bunch of buses at one time. Those were all financed. If we can buy a bus every year, it helps avoid that big problem where it hits us all at once,” Bentz said.
Christmas Lighting Snow Train
“A lot of you have read the articles the Echo about the problems with the Snow Train. There was a lot of erroneous information in that article with regard to the issue being caused by Cascade School District buses, that our buses delayed traffic for an hour. That is just ridiculous,” Bentz said. “Tom Keziah really spoke to the issue well. The reality is Cascade School buses probably delay traffic maybe 10 minutes of that hour. There’s not really a lot we can do about it. We have 1,000 people to get to the train.”
The reason he is bringing this up, Bentz said, is they’ve been told the city will no longer pay for the police officers to run interference to get the buses out. He said the city has threatened they might follow through this year.
He said the chamber doesn’t want to pay for it and obviously neither will the school district. Bentz said it is very costly to have those sheriff’s deputies running interference, getting the buses across the highway and then back down to get more people.
“I’ve made it very clear to Alki (the snow train tour company), the city, the chamber, that if we don’t have those officers running interference, we’re done. We won’t do it. It’s not worth it. It’s hard enough, having all the police help we do have. It would be next to impossible to try and do it without that,” Bentz said. “Alki knows. I don’t know what we’ll end up with come Christmas time, but they all know, if the police go away, so does Cascade School District. They can find another school district to transport people to and from the train. We just can’t do it without that.”
Substitute Bus Drivers
Bentz said they are having a hard time finding substitute bus drivers. He puts part of the blame on the Department of Licensing commercial driver requirements, which he says are making it harder and harder on the school district.
“They get more stringent, more anal. It’s ridiculous, the requirements they put on these drivers.
For instance, they have to quote back their pre-trip inspection. If you don’t use the exact words they want you to use, regarding a piece of equipment on a bus or whatever, you get marked off. You might fail your test. You have to learn that thing verbatim,” Bentz said.
Bentz said they recently lost someone who had been training with them for months, thanks to the DOL in Wenatchee. He said this person was trained and ready to go. He had been issued a CDL permit.
“He didn’t quite get everything done in time to where he could take his tests. When they renewed his permit, they failed to put the courses he already passed. Through a big series of phone calls to Olympia, they finally agreed they would put those back his temp license, if he took two other tests they failed to offer him when he took his CDL test,” Bentz said. “He went ahead and took those. They said, the system isn’t working. You’re going to have to take all the tests over, including the two you just took and passed. After that, he said, he was done. He’s a guy we spent months on, and lost because of the inefficiency at DOL.”
That is the kind of stuff they are running into, Bentz said.
“If you know anybody that wants to drive school bus, we start at $18 per hour. We’ll train ya. We’re looking for substitute bus drivers. Please send people our way. We’d love to have you,” he said. “Most of our routes are 3.75 to six hours a day. Most fall in between that. Great hours. We have a good fleet of buses.”
State Transportation Allocations
Bentz said the way transportation is funded has a changed a lot in the 37 years he’s been involved. He said he used to do his ridership reports on tracing paper over county maps. Now, they use GPS, where every stop is mapped precisely. He said that is much more efficient.
“They used to actually reward us for being inefficient. In district like ours and you go long distances and you don’t have a lot of kids in a particular area, they would pay you more money for under-loading your buses,” Bentz said. “We had greater revenue for having lightly loaded buses. That all went away with the new system.”
The school district generates a lot of revenue because of the amount of territory they cover, he said. Cascade is one of the largest school districts, geographically, in the state. He said the school district is about the size of the state of Rhode Island, in terms of the square miles they cover.
“Because of that, we generate a lot of dollars. In the 2015-16 school year, our transportation allocation was $740,000. Our expenditures that year were $700,133 for a difference of $40,000,” Bentz said. “We operated within our budget. We generate a lot of money but we spend a lot of money. A lot goes towards driver’s wages but also the upkeep of an aging fleet. Each year, we manage to work within our means.”
In the 16-17 school year, the revenue was $766,000 and expenditures were $742,000. This year, the allocation is $786,000.
“We’ve gone up each year, which is good. I fully expect we’ll operate within our budget. That always hinges on ridership. I’ve been pleased with our ridership numbers this year,” he said.
New radio system
Bentz said they put in a new radio system this year, which includes a repeater about 10 miles up Chumstick.
“We can talk to our buses if they are up Stevens Pass, upper end of Lake Wenatchee, Chiwawa Loop, Ponderosa,” Bentz said. “We actually have more problems talking to buses down at PD and that is the truth. We can talk to the buses on the far end of the district crystal clear. We try talk to the buses at PD and it’s scratchy and garbled.”
Route Changes
Board member Kristen Wood asked if there has been any discussion on the changes in the routes which in some cases mixed younger kids with older ones.
“At the very beginning, we had a few folks we were a little concerned because we were running some K-5 routes and some older kid routes in certain areas of district. We had some parents because now their younger children are going to be exposed to the older kids, who sometimes have potty mouths,” Bentz said.
Bentz said they are still working through that at times.
“There is nothing you can do to make everything 100 percent safe. There’s nothing we can do to 100 percent sure things aren’t going to happen that parents are unhappy with,” Bentz said. “We work at and do a good job at it. We get very few complaints from parents about those issues. It’s really worked well. We were pretty much forced to go to the system because of efficiencies required by the state. If we hadn’t done that, we’ve have to come up with a whole lot of money that wasn’t funded.”
Superintendent Bill Motsenbocker asked if there was any progress adding a Lake Wenatchee bus for the kids near Winton.
“We probably need to talk about that more. It would probably be one of those things that would not fund itself. It will generate some funds, but probably not pay for itself,” Bentz said.
Ian Dunn can be reached at 548-5286 or editor@leavenworthecho.com.

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