(Note: Eliza Shapiro is the DoE reporter for POLITICO New York)

City Department of Education to start re-bidding process for school bus contracts

By Eliza Shapiro
12/29/2017 01:33 PM EDT

The city Department of Education released requests for bids for school bus contracts Friday.

The first round of re-bidding will cover some contracts that were settled by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2013 and are set to expire in June. Other contracts will expire in 2019. The city currently buses about 150,000 students on 8,200 different bus routes every day; 60 vendors provide the 9,300 buses needed to transport those children.

The majority of the city's busing contracts — about 60 percent — extend back to 1979. The other 40 percent were settled after the 2013 bus strike, which crippled the schools for weeks.

The requests for bids will cover about 1,300 routes. Education officials said the department will roll out re-bidding in phases because of the enormous scale of the entire re-bidding process.

The new contracts will officially restore a series of bus driver protections known as EPPs that were eliminated by Bloomberg, ultimately leading to the strike. Those protections will mostly benefit more experienced bus drivers.

As public advocate, now-Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to reintroduce EPPs. His administration has sought to boost wage and benefit protections for senior bus drivers in several ways, including the introduction of a controversial grant program that subsidizes more experienced bus drivers. Some budget watchdogs and City Council members have said the grant amounts to an intrusion by the city into collective bargaining agreements.

Now, with the re-bidding process, the city is trying another strategy to reinstate those protections. Although they both deal with employee protections, the grant program is different from the re-bidding.

Education officials say the re-bidding process will encourage competition, incentivize contractors to use low-emission or no-emission buses and facilitate upgrades to existing buses.

The city's busing routes have grown by nearly 20 percent in the last five years.

"This is the right decision for New York City kids and families who rely on school buses and school bus staff every day," Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said in a statement. "We're opening up our bus contracts to competition while ensuring we have the most experienced, highest-quality bus drivers and attendants looking after our kids."



Thanks to our delegate, Ernie for the heads-up.

Great news,thanks for the info Buzz.Going in the right direction 👍