Wednesday, May 20, 2009
By Harold Gwin
The business committee chairman said a CBS proposal looks like the best deal so far.
YOUNGSTOWN — The Youngstown City School District’s transportation department says it can trim $180,000 a year off student transportation costs by reducing the number of daily bus routes from 51 to 41.
Steve Ambrosio, chief of transportation for the district, told the school board’s Business Committee Tuesday that Youngstown has been gradually trimming the number of routes over the past several years as student enrollment declined. The district has lost 3,000 students over the last several years, he said.
The latest reduction proposal comes as the Business Committee is looking for ways to cut the district’s $5 million annual transportation bill.
The board already is considering a proposed transportation management contract from Community Bus Services Inc. that guarantees a $500,000-per-year cost savings.
Michael Murphy, Business Committee chairman, said his committee didn’t know the transportation department was going to come up with its own cost-savings proposal until recently.
The committee also is expecting some sort of proposal from an unnamed consultant who has worked with the Western Reserve Transit Authority on its transportation programs and had expected to get that at Tuesday’s meeting. However, the consultant was unable to attend, Murphy said.
The CBS proposal appears to be the best offer at this point, he said.
The CBS plan would reduce the number of bus routes from 51 to 40 and make various other administrative changes to save funds.
A key to that proposal is the cost of outfitting 40 district buses with digital video recorder/global positioning systems to track routes.
CBS is willing to pick up that $160,000 cost as well as the $200,000 expense in personnel and computer software to implement the rerouting.
The district transportation department proposal calls for the purchase of 60 of those units to cover all of its buses, an expense that could run about $80,000 for equipment comparable to that proposed by CBS. Ambrosio said additional cost quotes from other companies are expected, as are quotes on the cost of software to implement maintenance and other program schedules.
Murphy said the cost of that equipment would likely have to come out of the $180,000 route reduction savings under the transportation department plan, thereby cutting the overall amount of the annual savings.
Tony DeNiro, assistant superintendent for school business affairs, said additional savings would be realized with the software management tools, but no estimate was immediately available.
Neither proposal calls for any staff reductions.
CBS is preparing some financial documents to prove that the $500,000 in annual savings can be realized, he said, adding that he expects that detail, as well as additional cost projections from the district’s transportation department proposal, at the committee’s June 8 meeting.
gwin@vindy.com