School District plans to add two satellite bus yards in outlying areas

Terry Webster

Wednesday, Sept. 29, 1999 | 11:41 a.m.

By not going the extra mile, the Clark County School District stands to save $50 million in busing costs over a 10-year period, according to the transportation division.

And they plan to do it with an ever-growing student population.

How?

By building two satellite school bus yards and reducing costs by lowering the number of miles traveled to and from outlying areas, said Patrick L. Herron, assistant superintendent of the Facilities and Transportation Service Division.

"The county has gotten so large and spread out that creating the satellite yards are better in terms of busing and maintenance," Herron said.

The cost, about $15 million each including buildings and furnishings, is being funded through the 1998 Capital Improvement Building Program.

Final locations for the new bus yards have not been pinned down, although they likely will be placed in the north and south ends of the city. Scheideman said he expects the locations to be named within two months.

After the new bus yards are built, the district will have six. The largest of the four current bus yards, spanning about 30 acres and housing some 350 buses, is at Arville Street and Harmon Avenue. Other sites are located at Galleria Road near U.S. 95, Stewart and Eastern Avenues and Cheyenne Road near Interstate 15.

Able to accommodate 500 buses each, the new bus yards will feature maintenance facilities, an administrative office with a meeting area for drivers, and a car parking lot.

"The sites will cover about 30 to 40 acres," said Scheideman.

Rapid growth in the area is creating an urgency to complete the bus yards.

"We're growing at about 100 buses per year," Transportation Director Ronald Despenza said. "And we're pretty much landlocked on our existing facilities."

By 2002 the first new bus yard is expected to be completed. The second will follow a couple of years later, Scheideman said.

To calculate the estimated savings, Despenza said he factored a total cost of operating the buses by using expenses of $22 an hour, $1.25 per mile and student population projections.

The expenses portion includes "everything," defined by Despenza as bus drivers, equipment and fuel.

"These are conservative estimates," he said. The savings could be greater. But parents shouldn't count on the extra dollars being applied toward more busing.

More likely it will be spent in the classroom, Despenza said.

Students living two miles or less away from their school have to walk, unless there is a safety hazard.

The terrain children are walking is one of the safety concerns parents have expressed.

"There has to be a safe walk path, but that does not necessarily mean concrete," Despenza said, adding that the transportation department has a safety patrol that regularly tours walkways to ensure they are safe.

An option to reduce the walking distance for students from two miles to one-and-a-half miles is not under consideration right now because it would cost the district about $13 million.

"We just don't have the money," Despenza said.

Meanwhile, there are ongoing efforts to cut costs.

Another cost-savings measure implemented about four years ago has saved about $10 million by reducing man-hours spent on evaluating bus routes.

"That was due to the introduction of a computerized routing and scheduling system," Despenza said. "Every year we are refining it."

One of the system's features is identifying students receiving bus service who are not eligible for it.

Although the district-owned operation is huge, Despenza said he isn't interested in having the largest school transportation organization in the country.

But with an average of 852 buses on the roads daily in 1998, the district ranked 17th in the nation in School Bus Fleet magazine's top 100 list. Clark County is No. 1 on that list in terms of total squares miles covered, with 8,090.

Between regular bus runs and school activities, the transportation department last year logged 14.5 million miles and transported about 85,000 students.

The transportation department's 4,012 runs and 11,481 stops daily represents 41 percent more trips than Southwest Airlines.