The Central Arkansas Transit Authority will turn down approximately $50,000 in grant funds awarded by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, a CATA spokesman said Thursday.

CATA spokesman Jason Smedley said transit authority administrators had contacted the department shortly after Wednesday’s announcement that CATA was one of five recipients of funds intended for the reduction of diesel exhaust throughout the state.

The recipients were all entities that had applied to the department’s Go RED program, also known as the Reduce Emissions from Diesels program. The program, which began in 2008, is funded through the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 and the Diesel Emissions Act of 2010.

In November, the department announced that more than $197,000 was available through the program. Although the department began accepting applications in December, the program uses a “rolling deadline” process that accepts new applications through April 30, as long as funds are still available. Elizabeth Sartain, the environmental program coordinator with the department’s air division, said department administrators are now evaluating additional applicants for the remaining grant funds.

Wednesday, department spokesman Katherine Benenati released a statement saying approximately $160,000 of the funds had been awarded. CATA received the largest portion, $50,000, for the replacement of as many as “eight buses with either clean diesel or natural gas engines.”

Smedley said that after the transit authority applied for the grant in late 2013, CATA’s plans for updating its fleet of about 60 buses changed after securing millions of dollars in federal and local funding. In a March 18 news release, Smedley said CATA will be purchasing 15 new heavy-duty transit buses that are fueled by compressed natural gas, at a cost of approximately $6.9 million.

Because the grant program aims to reduce total diesel emissions, the older diesel engines being replaced must be either returned to the original manufacturer to be “remanufactured” to modern emission standards or destroyed, rather than resold, Sartain said.

“We don’t destroy buses,” Smedley said.

Smedley said that because the transit authority had elected to replace the older buses rather than simply replace the engines, as the language in their grant application stated, it wasn’t practical to accept the funds.

Rodney Middleton, director of maintenance for CATA, said the new buses will replace 16 older diesel buses, which were built in either 2001 or 2003. Middleton said that the typical transit bus has a life expectancy of about 12 years or 500,000 miles.

Smedley said CATA’s overall operating budget was about $17 million, not including the bus-replacement funds. The authority serves about 2.8 million to 3 million riders each year.

According to a statement from the Environmental Quality Department, other grant recipients include the County Line School District in Franklin County’s Branch; and the Clinton School District in Van Buren County.

One grant-fund recipient in Northwest Arkansas is the Ozark School District based in Franklin County. The district, which serves approximately 1,850 students, was awarded almost $24,000, which will help subsidize the purchase of a new diesel school bus.

John Bennett, director of transportation for the district, said students are transported by a fleet of 27 buses, of which district administrators typically replace one or two each year.

“Our district is about 340 square miles, and we travel around 1,200 linear miles a day,” Bennett said. “A lot of that’s still somewhat rural.”

Ozark School District Superintendent Jim Ford said that the lowest bid the district had received for a replacement bus was about $83,000. The district’s total annual transportation budget is about $150,000, Ford said.

In 2012, the World Health Organization identified diesel exhaust as “carcinogenic to humans,” citing evidence that it is linked to cancers of the lungs and bladder. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Emission Inventory, diesel equipment in Arkansas produced more than 80,000 tons of pollutants in 2011, the last year for which data are available.

Arkansas, Pages 12 on 04/04/2014