Authorizes school districts to use district funds for the installation and maintenance of wood pellet, wood chip or other biomass burning boiler systems

Section 2 provides the effective date.

Existing law

Section 3602 of the Education Law 3602 relates to the apportionment of public money to school districts employing eight or more teachers. Subdivision 6 of the section outlines the apportionment for capital outlays and debt service for school building purposes.

This bill adds a new subparagraph to subdivision 6 authorizing school districts to use any funds otherwise dedicated for renovations or repairs to a building within the district to pay for the installation and maintenance of a wood pellet, wood chips, or other biomass burning boiler system. There are no other provisions of law related to the school district maintenance of a wood pellet, wood chip, or other biomass burning boiler systems.

Justification

Giving rural schools the option of using school renovation funds to install wood pellet, chip or biomass burning boiler heating systems dramatically helps rebuild Upstate's economy and create new jobs and employment opportunities. When isolated rural school districts renovate or replace their heating systems, a biomass boiler system can be an environmentally sustainable and cost effective alternative to foreign fossil fuel fired boiler systems. In the rural community of Edwards, N.Y., for example, the cost of heating oil would have to drop to as low as 87 cents a gallon to be as competitive as wood chips to heat the school district.

In neighboring Vermont, over 20% of its students attend schools that use bio-fuels for heating. Modern institutional high-temperature systems are much more environmentally friendly than traditional wood burning systems. Over the course of a typical winter, a biomass boiler system for a 200,000 square-foot school produces less particulate emissions than six residential wood stoves, according to Vermont's Biomass Energy Resource Center (BERC) and its School Energy Management Program (SEMP). Vermont's Biomass Energy Resource Center points out that unlike oil, gas and coal which add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, burning wood adds essentially no new carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, reducing the school's carbon footprint.

By encouraging biomass, wood chips and pellets energy dollars are kept local. Money spent on oil and gas drains the local economy while communities that use biomass create sustainable local forestry and agricultural jobs. Biomass reduces greenhouse gases and acid rain because, unlike fossil fuels, it contains no sulfur. Woodchips and pellets help improve forest health by providing a market for low grade wood, providing incentives to forest owners to practice sustainable forestry. Furthermore, biomass is substantially less expensive than oil and propane and in some cases slightly less expensive than natural gas. Even ash residue has a positive economic impact, as left over ash can be used as an agricultural fertilizer as a replacement for lime, which adds to biomass's value as a sustainable fuel resource.

Enabling rural districts to install and maintain wood pellet burning boiler systems is extremely cost effective and allows districts with limited budgets to maximize resources. For the aforementioned reasons it is imperative that this bill is enacted.

Legislative history

New bill.

Fiscal implications

None.

Effective date

This act shall take effect immediately.