Cough, Cough: Adams Administration Hands Largest Ever Idling Law Exemption to NJ Charter Bus Company

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A New Jersey-based charter bus company will be allowed to spew toxic fumes with impunity under a proposed variance granted by the city Department of Environmental Protection as the Adams administration sputters to a close.

Academy Bus Lines requested the exemption — the largest in DEP's history — after receiving more than $500,000 in idling violations through a city program that allows citizens to submit complaints and receive a portion of any resulting violation. Under DEP's proposed variance, announced on Friday, the city will allow the company to have its 701 diesel-powered charter buses idling in sub-32-degree and over 80-degree weather so long as it either electrifies or installs auxiliary power units on its 16 smaller vehicles.

No APU technology exists for the Academy "heavy-duty" motorcoaches, DEP said, so those buses will be granted an exemption from the city's 53-year-old anti-idling law.

"Due to the lack of proven alternatives or retrofit technologies for long-distance buses, and the impact on passenger comfort during cold and hot weather of not running the onboard climate control systems, there is likely currently to be an unreasonable hardship during extreme weather," DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala wrote in a letter to the company explaining the permission to pollute.

The variance will expire in two years — at which point DEP believes "the changing availability of technology" will make it unnecessary. As a condition for the exemption, DEP will require Academy to "install at least one electric APU on a long-distance motorcoach" and "acquire and deploy one long-distance fully electric bus" by the end of the two-year variance period.

Academy must also pay the outstanding fines it owes for previously incurred idling violations, the letter said.

As part of granting the exemption, DEP laid out a specific timeline for Academy to solicit proposals for the APU and EVs. The light- and medium-duty vehicles must be replaced with EVs or have their APUs installed within one year.

Academy's variance will likely open the floodgates for more bus companies to seek exemptions from the idling law, which was sparsely enforced by the launch of the citizens complaint program in the late 2010s.

However, anti-idling advocates and citizen enforcers opposed to the variance argued that the existence or non-existence of tech to replace emission-spewing engines is irrelevant to whether Academy and other bus companies should follow the law. They pointed to a recent settlement between a similar bus company and Washington earlier this month.

Rather than turning off their engines, however, the bus companies have declared war on the idling law in general and citizen enforcement program in particular — bringing their case directly to Mayor Adams and City Hall.

In an April 21 letter addressed to Adams, the American Bus Association panned "aggressive and unruly" citizen enforcement and the fact that the idling law does not apply to government-owned vehicles and buses. In June, New York-based bus groups sent a letter to Aggarwala asking to be allowed to idle for up to 15 minutes.

Members of the New York Clean Air Collective of citizen idling enforcers condemned the move by DEP to grant Academy an exemption.

"Just in time for the holidays, and despite the testimony of hundreds of New Yorkers sick of excessive idling, Eric Adams’s DEP leadership has offered a corporate polluter yet another valuable gift — future immunity from our environmental laws and a backroom discount on half a million dollars in fines," said George Pakenham, one of the group's co-founders.

"We strongly encourage Mayor Mamdani to appoint new DEP leadership who will put ordinary New Yorkers first, including by ending DEP’s discriminatory policy of blocking New Yorkers without English fluency from participating in the Citizens Air Complaint Program."