Bureaucratic squabbles among NY officials likely to cause a year's delay in installation of 500 EV chargers statewide, including 12 for Croton-on-Hudson.
Grant awards were announced last April, but Dept of Environmental Conservation and state Comptroller's office have been blaming each other for the delay. No firm date for release of funds.
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Last April, Croton officials and sustainable energy advocates got some good news: The village was among roughly 70 communities throughout New York state that had won awards from the Department of Environmental Conservation’s (DEC) Municipal Zero-emission Vehicle (ZEV) Infrastructure Grant Program. Croton’s share amounted to $149,266.78, which would pay for six dual-port EV charging stations in the Croton-Harmon train station parking lot (a total of 12 chargers.)
Among the lucky winners were several other nearby communities, including Mount Pleasant ($250,000), Pleasantville (about $43.6K), Sleepy Hollow ($38.1K), and Briarcliff Manor ($25.8K.) The total award amount was about $10 million statewide, which would cover about 500 new EV chargers.
Croton village staff and sustainability advocates had put a lot of work into the grant application, slogging through 49 dense pages of instructions and submitting multiple rounds of documents into the DEC’s computers. We always had a good chance, especially because the proposed charging stations were near transportation, commerce, and a major highway, for which the village tallied points towards its final score (we also got credit for being a Climate Smart Community and for being able to demonstrate we planned to expand the number of chargers in the near future.)
But then something went wrong. Months went by, and the money did not come. Croton officials began to inquire, along with state legislators including Senator Pete Harckham’s office and the staff of Assemblywoman Dana Levenberg. Details were scarce, but they included the information that the DEC had made some kind of mistake in the paperwork it submitted to the state Comptroller’s office, and the latter would not approve release of the funds until it was fixed.
Nor, from all appearances, did anyone in the DEC consider fixing the problem to be very urgent. Eventually, queries from the recipient communities began to go unanswered.
Queries by The Croton Chronicle, which we began to make more than a month ago, also went unanswered at first, despite multiple attempts. Finally, about a week ago, we heard from a DEC spokesperson that the Comptroller’s office had required that the procurement orders be updated before they could be approved—again, with no hint of what had been wrong with the orders in the first place—and that once that was done, things could move forward.
We then approached the Comptroller’s office to ask for its comment. Earlier this week, we received a more detailed explanation from Mark Johnson, Press Secretary to
New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli:
“OSC rejected a procurement associated with this in August 2023 as there were discrepancies between the various scoring documents submitted that could not be explained by DEC.
The procurement record was re-submitted by DEC in December of 2023 with the scoring discrepancies acknowledged and corrected, and subsequently approved by our office.
The next step would be for DEC to submit to our office for approval the contracts awarded pursuant to the approved procurement record. That has not happened to date.”
We then went back to the DEC to find out when they planned to resubmit the awarded contracts. The response this morning, from a spokesperson:
“OSC has approved the corrected procurement record. DEC staff are currently preparing the necessary contracts and expects to submit them to OSC for approval in early 2024.”
While “early 2024” is pretty vague, it seems likely that at least a year will pass between the original grant awards being announced last April and any EV chargers being installed in the train station parking lot (these 12 chargers, by the way, are meant to be integrated into the solar array system currently being built at the station, with allowance being made for installation of another 12 chargers later on as need arises.)
Lindsay Audin, chair of the Croton Sustainability Committee, does not mince words about the effects the delay has had on Croton and other New York communities:
"Having won the $150,000 grant last April, we had hoped to get started shortly thereafter on installing two dozen EV chargers at the Croton-Harmon train station. This ongoing delay - for purely bureaucratic reasons - flies in the face of the State's fight against climate change. Not only is Croton affected: dozens of other communities across the State also won now-delayed grants to pay for almost 500 EV chargers. Were there no delay, by now many could have already been installed. We don't have the luxury to waste any more time. We call on the the State agencies to quit their quibbling and do the jobs for which we are paying them!"
(Village manager Bryan Healy had not responded to multiple requests for comment as the Chronicle went to press.)
There may be some lessons for our political leaders in this latest debacle. The low-key approach they took to handling this unfortunate situation, using what might be called quiet diplomacy, simply did not work—and it usually does not. It would have required making some public noise to speed things up, and that may still be required in the end.
As always, we will stay on top of this story, until those chargers get installed.
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