Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Craig Pittman
Way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was just a Florida boy, not yet a Florida man, I rode the bus to school every day.
I well remember the roar of that yellow monster’s diesel engine and the choking swirl of exhaust smoke and red clay dust that drifted through the open windows. They stayed open all the time because of the bus’s lack of air conditioning.
I envy the kids in Dixie County—which is not a statement I ever expected to make.
Dixie County is about 50 miles east of Gainesville. This month, in the county seat of Cross City, the Dixie County School District debuted its fleet of 23 new school buses—all of them electric.
They all have air conditioning, too, which means they’re both cool and quiet. That makes them the opposite of the buses I rode in my youth.
“Kids were riding the bus in the middle of summer without air conditioning, so making this change seemed like the right thing to do,” Dixie School Board Chairman Tim Alexander told me this week.
One of Dixie’s veteran bus drivers told a local online news publication called Main Street Daily News that she’s been driving buses for 33 years and has never before had one with air conditioning.
She put on a cardigan for her new vehicle’s maiden voyage, so she could keep the A/C cranked for the trip. While she drove, the electric engine was so quiet, kids kept asking her if she was sure she’d turned the motor on.
“Bus drivers also said the new buses’ air conditioning means they can leave the windows up, dodging the dust that has flooded through open windows for years, giving riders and drivers headaches,” Main Street Daily News reported.
People in the more urban parts of Florida tend to look down on the less populous, rural areas like Dixie County. But now little Dixie has one of the largest electric bus fleets in the state.
I first heard about Dixie’s new buses from Mia McCormick of Environment Florida. She told me the Dixie County folks had run into a ton of vocal opposition in their bid for an all-electric fleet, but they stuck to their goal anyway.
“In today’s divisive environment, putting student health before politics is brave,” McCormick told me. “These local leaders deserve a medal for persevering and giving these students a better chance at success.”
I asked Alexander about what he called “community opposition,” and all he said, was “Change is difficult for some people.”
Missing a Commandment
Despite its small size, Dixie County occasionally makes big headlines.
In 2007, Dixie County made news because Commissioner “Big John” Driggers erected a 6-ton granite replica of the Ten Commandments at the courthouse. It prompted a lawsuit that went on for years before the suit was dropped.
Big John wound up making even more headlines in 2009, when he was one of several officials in Dixie and Levy counties who were busted for taking bribes from an undercover FBI agent whose alias was the same name as that of a porn star.
Oh, if only there’d been a commandment that said, “Thou shalt not take secret payoffs from developers who might be X-rated actors.”
Dixie is the only county in the South named for the Confederacy’s fight song, according to Visit Florida. Created in 1921, Dixie is perhaps best known to travelers for being one of the places where your drive takes you across a bridge over the picturesque Suwannee River.
It’s also home to Fanning Springs State Park, the Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge, and the Nature Coast State Trail. In other words, there’s a lot of Dixie that remains natural and undeveloped. When I’m driving on U.S. 19, I often stop in Dixie County. I like to visit one of the state’s oldest roadside boiled peanut stands, Maria’s Dixie Nut House.
Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge via Visit Dixie.
We’re No. 4
Nobody tell the Legislature about the new buses in the heart of Dixie, because they may not like it. In recent years, our state legislators have shown hostility toward every kind of energy besides fossil fuels.
Our last House speaker, Paul Renner, ranted about woke billionaires pushing the green agenda (while raking in campaign contributions from oil industry billionaires).
When the feds offered $350 million in energy efficiency incentives to Floridians, Gov. Ron DeSantis promptly rejected it with no explanation. He also vetoed a bill that would have required the state to buy more electric vehicles—once again, with no explanation.
Meanwhile, he and the Legislature almost completely deleted climate change from being mentioned in state law, which has led to repealing the state’s renewable energy goals. They’ve banned discussion of the science behind the increased intensity of our recent hurricanes like it was a book about an adoption by a same-sex penguin couple.
Yet while our clueless “leaders” have been bending over backward to cater to their wealthy oil industry contributors, the rest of us have been embracing alternatives that are better for the planet and our pocketbooks.
Clay County solar farm via Moss Solar.
Florida’s utilities, for instance, have been building nothing but solar farms. They like the fact that the fuel cost for collecting rays of light from the sun is so much lower than buying natural gas.
Nearly 30,000 Floridians have installed solar power on their homes this year, bringing the number of installations to more than 253,000. The 3.1 gigawatts of solar-generation capacity added this year is the second most in the nation, ranking just behind Texas.
Dixie County is just one of 12 Florida counties that have bought electric school buses for their fleets. The others include such populous counties as Pinellas, Hillsborough, Broward, and Palm Beach, and smaller ones such as Jefferson, Columbia, and Lafayette.
“We’re now No. 4 in the U.S. in terms of the number of electric school buses,” Mary Linn of the non-partisan Electrification Coalition’s Orlando office told me.
Started By a Middle Schooler
This all started when school superintendent Mike Thomas was attending an economic development meeting two years ago, Linn told me. That’s when he heard there was federal money available for buying electric buses.
“They applied and they were shocked to learn they received the full amount,” she said. “They never thought they’d get anything like this.”
The buses themselves cost about $8.6 million, and the charging infrastructure was another $500,000 or so. Both were covered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the most poorly named piece of legislation ever, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Dixie’s electric buses are among the 66,000 projects funded by the $568 billion plan, which is considered the nation’s largest investment ever in clean energy. That’s the source of some of the opposition to the buses, too.
“People were calling the school board and complaining about this was ‘Biden money,’” Linn said.
Dixie County, you may have already guessed, voted for the other guy in 2020 and this year too, even though he’s now a convicted felon. If it were up to him, there’d be no electric vehicles at all and everyone would be driving big gas guzzlers.
But Dixie school officials, as with the other school districts, weren’t trying to score political points for either party or even to save the planet. As with most of Florida’s districts that have gone electric, the Dixie folks were just trying to spare their students and drivers from awful conditions.
Take what happened in Miami-Dade, the first Florida county to add electric buses.
The drive to electrify school transportation there started when a middle school student named Holly Thorpe did a science experiment. She’d noticed that while she and other students stood under a covered spot to take the school bus home every day, the shelter trapped the noxious diesel fumes from six to 12 buses that had been idling for hours.
For her experiment, Thorpe measured the carbon dioxide in the bus depot and the surrounding area, including inside the buses. The result shocked her.
“It was 40 times the tolerable amount for human consumption.” Thorpe told the Key Biscayne Independent.
Thorpe was a member of a school club called Green Champions. They began lobbying the school board to switch to electric buses. Initially the school board wasn’t interested but eventually came around and the desire to go electric spread to other counties.
Now the only part of the state with no electric school buses is the Panhandle, Linn said.
Power to the People
She doesn’t really resemble her, but as Linn spoke in glowing terms about the glories of electrification, she reminded me of the teacher on “The Magic School Bus,” Ms. Frizzle. They both have that same “look at this!” enthusiasm.
The Dixie district is so small, it serves approximately 2,000 students across five schools, from pre-K through 12th grade. Still, its 23 buses will collectively travel 270,000 miles annually. By avoiding 228 metric tons of CO2 emissions, the electric buses will improve air quality for the whole community so everyone can breathe easier.
But wait!—as the infomercials used to say—there’s so much more!
Every school district in Florida would benefit from switching from diesel to electric, Linn said, because the buses are rolling emergency power sources.
Whenever powerful hurricanes hit—and we seem to be seeing more of them these days—they tend to knock out the power for days. When that happens, these electric school buses can power the cooling systems in recreational centers and other storm shelters, she said.
“Dixie has been hit by three hurricanes in two years,” she pointed out.
There’s also the money the buses will save, she said. The new buses will cost far less for fuel and maintenance, which means more money will be available for the school district’s other needs.
In short, there are lots of reasons—money, student health, emergency preparation—why every school district in Florida ought to switch to the kind of buses now rolling around Dixie County.
But they’d better hurry and put in for the EPA money before that other guy takes office. He thinks making America great again involves making every kid ride on the kind of buses I rode on: the loud, stinky ones with no air conditioning.
