View letter to the Commisioner of Environmental Protection

Citing a new report exposing a “disturbing lack of progress,” New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. today called on the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to improve its efforts to ensure that tour buses are retrofitted to curb pollution.

Thompson said a recent DEP report – which was filed eight months late – exposed not just slow progress but “widespread non-compliance” with Local Law 41, enacted three years ago to force sight-seeing bus companies to upgrade their fleet.

“This crucial law required sight-seeing companies to retrofit their tour vehicles by January 1, 2007 as a way of reducing their particulate and nitrogen oxide emissions, which contribute greatly to air-borne pollutants,” Thompson noted in his letter to DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd last week. You can view the letter at www.comptroller.nyc.gov.

The number of sight-seeing buses in New York City has increased approximately six-fold since 1994. Citing concerns about pollution, the City passed Local Law 41 in May 2005, giving companies more than a year-and-a-half to use the “best available retrofit available” to reduce diesel particulate levels, ideally by as much as 85 percent, and allowed them to seek waivers if retrofits were not possible.

DEP also is required to file annual reports - tracking DEP’s progress in enforcing the law to ensure that polluting vehicles are replaced or upgraded - to the Comptroller’s Office and City Council. But, Thompson said, DEP failed to complete the Fiscal Year 2006-2007 report until late August 2008 - about eight months late.

Additionally, that report exposed the slow progress to meet compliance. “I am particularly concerned that anti-pollution devices had not yet been installed on more than seven in ten tour vehicles -- at least 143 buses,” Thompson said.

The Comptroller further raised concerns that:

• Only 19 of the 206 tour buses had met the retrofit requirement by the end of the reporting period, June 30, 2007.
  
• Only one company, Gray Line New York Tours, had made these conversions. Gray Line continues to convert its fleet to the proper technology and, as of late August, had retrofitted another 42 buses, with 49 more to convert.
  
• Not one of the other ten tour companies – currently operating a total of 94 buses – had installed anti-pollution devices in their buses.
  
• Altogether, as of August 2008, only 61 of the 204 tour buses currently on the road and covered by Local Law 41 met the law’s emissions requirements.

“The slow progress is particularly striking given the tremendous strides that MTA New York City Transit – which operates 4,758 buses in the city –made between 1995 and 2006 in reducing particulate matter emissions from its own fleet; particulate matter emissions declined by 97 percent and NOx emissions by 58 percent,” Thompson wrote.

The Comptroller called on the DEP to answer key questions before submitting its next report, due in January. He demanded the DEP identify the status – and timelines - of retrofits by certain companies, supply information on efforts to revoke licenses of non-complying companies, and detail the total number of sight-seeing buses with licenses now on New York City roads today.

“A healthy tourism industry is essential for the economic well-being of our city,” Thompson said, “but cleaner sightseeing buses are important for our air quality and the health of New Yorkers and our visitors. I urge your office to be more vigilant in ensuring that these companies abide by the requirements of Local Law 41.”

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