The Daily Agenda: Tucson's all-electric fleet will have to wait

Preventing further damage is the priority ... This is why we can't have nice things ... A bit of backstory in the Ward 1 race.

City officials are chipping away at an ambitious climate action plan, but they’re finding that it’s not as simple as buying electric buses and planting trees.

First, Tucson has to stop making the situation worse.

This means that the transition to an all-electric bus fleet — a portion of the plan — will take a little longer. Instead, the immediate priority is getting all remaining diesel-fueled buses off the road.

The city can accomplish that in a year-and-a-half, city officials say, if they make the switch now to buses fueled by compressed natural gas.

The city’s official climate plan calls for “fleet electrification” and commits the city to a low to no-emission fleet by 2025. But for now, natural gas may be the best possible option.

Moving to a natural gas fleet now maximizes the city’s funding, gives the industry time to advance electric vehicle technology and provides local experts the opportunity to deal with existing challenges involving infrastructure and climate, officials say.

“Going with the (natural gas buses,) we get rid of all the diesel fleet,” said city spokesman Andy Squire. “So, we’re taking care of the really heavy greenhouse gas producing buses now.”

It’s also the more cost-efficient route, as an electric bus costs twice the price of a natural gas bus, according to Squire. They also require a charging station, which takes additional time and money to build.

The transportation sector produces 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, so reducing that number is important not just for the environment, but also for the health of the community, Mayor Regina Romero said in a recent city council study session.

Currently, the city’s fleet includes 185 buses: 106 of them are natural gas fueled, 10 are electric and 69 are diesel. The 69 diesel buses are in the process of being replaced with 59 natural gas buses and 10 electric buses. That should be enough to meet the city’s goal of having a fully decarbonized fleet by 2025.

While 10 electric buses might not seem like much, Tucson has the largest electric bus fleet in the Southwest, even before the 10 more it’s poised to add, councilman Kevin Dahl wrote in his newsletter.

“We just don’t have the ability at this time to take on that many new electric buses,” Dahl wrote. “Bringing on (natural gas) buses does get the more-polluting diesel-fueled buses off the road and gives us time to get the infrastructure in place to use more electric buses.”

While electric buses are the long-term goal, the plan is to use the natural gas buses in the “near-term,” according to Deputy City Manager Tim Thomure.

But it’s unclear how long the near-term will be, as Sun Tran is still “refining how these buses operate in Tucson’s climate,” according to Thomure, who said that having a large number of natural buses for the “next couple of decades” really allows the city to maximize its resources.

“CNG buses can be delivered to Tucson faster, and in larger quantities, than electric at this time,” said in Dahl’s newsletter. “Staying ‘all electric’ with new buses would have left many diesel buses in operation for several additional years.”Thomure,

Work is being done at the Los Reales Sustainability Campus to capture methane and the city is creating its own internal market where it can capture and scrub methane, then use it as compressed natural gas, Squire said.

The methane gas “will continue to be released from the landfill for decades. By turning that gas into (compressed natural gas), the city will be able to make productive use of that gas, rather than simply letting it be emitted to the atmosphere,” Thomure wrote in Dahl’s newsletter.

So between the cost of electric buses, infrastructure needs and the decades-worth of methane circulating in Tucson, an all-electric fleet could still be a long ways off.

We did this to ourselves: Human-caused climate change has caused temperature spikes in both Tucson and Phoenix on more than half the days of the prolonged, record-setting heat wave that started in late-June, the Arizona Daily Star’s Tony Davis reports. The Star asked Climate Central to use its Climate Shift Index to show how much climate change boosted each day’s temperatures in both cities from June 1 through July 20. The index found that since June 25 here and June 26 in Phoenix, “the impacts of human-caused climate change triggered by fossil fuel burning and other greenhouse gas emissions began in a mild fashion and intensified through last week.”

“This July could surpass the heat of July and August 2020, which have been Tucson’s hottest two months on record,” Davis writes.

Post-monsoon power outage: Sunday night’s severe storm left about 1,300 Tucson Electric Power customers on the south side without Power Monday, after more than 36 poles were downed throughout the area, the Star reported. Crews were at work to restore service, but TEP said about 800 customers could remain without service for a couple days, until repairs are complete. 

Inside both camps: The Ward 1 race has been the one to watch this election cycle. The Tucson Sentinel’s Jim Nintzel sat down with candidates Lane Santa Cruz and Miguel Ortega, as well as their supporters, and revealed some of the backstory of the race.

"I have a grocery list of reasons why I'm running against Lane. And none of those reasons are based on hatred for Lane,” Ortega tells Nintzel. “In fact, I've often said that I like Lane very much. If it wasn't for the stark differences that we have in policy, I would be campaigning for her.”

Dealing with the backlog: The roughly 2 million cases still pending in immigration courts remain a major challenge for policymakers, but the Migration Policy Institute, an influential think tank, has some ideas to fix the backlog, AZPM’s Danyelle Khmara reports.

Don’t pass that joint: Dispensaries across the state are voluntarily recalling several products due to possible contamination with Aspergillus, a fungus that can cause allergic reactions or infection, usually in people who are already sick with something else, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. Symptoms range from asthma or cold-like symptoms to fever and chest pain, among others. The recalled products are Divinity and MAC from Grow Sciences and Gelato 41 from Soothing Options.

Learning from our neighbors: Both Arizona and Sonora, the Mexican state directly south of Arizona, are dealing with similar water issues and can learn from each other, Nicolás Pineda, professor of public policy at the Colegio de Sonora in Hermosillo, tells the Arizona Luminaria’s John Washington.

The total rainfall recorded at Tucson International Airport for 2023’s monsoon season is 0.51”, substantially lower than July’s average rainfall of 2.21”, according to the National Weather Service.