Mayor Brandon Scott announced last December that cars provided to Baltimore city workers must be zero emission by 2030. But in the nine months since then, the city has spent over $60 million repairing its existing vehicles or buying new ones, most of which are gas-powered.
1. Jeremy, can you give us more details on Baltimore’s vehicle spending this year?
Since Mayor Scott’s announcement, the city has spent $30 million on “fleet equipment repair” for its vehicles that were already in use before the announcement - almost all of which are gasoline-powered, including cars that won’t be in use by 2030.
They’ve spent $33 million on “Fleet Vehicle Purchases,” including several industrial trucks. That doesn’t include the $5 million the city plans to spend to buy 150 Teslas - which is only a fraction of the cost they’ve spent on gasoline vehicles this year.
2. How do those numbers compare to last year, before the city’s plan to buy more electric vehicles?
That’s the crazy part. After Mayor Scott asked the city to replace its fleet with electric vehicles, they increased their spending on buying vehicles by $13 million, even though most of the new vehicles are gas-powered.
For example, the city spent less than $2 million buying trucks from Maryland Industrial Trucks in the nine months before Scott’s announcement. In the nine months since then, they’ve spent over $5 million. Those trucks likely won't be included in Scott's ban on gas-powered passenger cars, but they'll still make it more difficult to meet the city's 2045 goal of net-zero emissions.
And the city’s monthly spending on “vehicle maintenance” has not changed, even though they know that most of their cars won’t be in use in a few years.
Their spending on pumping gasoline has also gone up slightly compared to last year. ($5.2 million to $5.5 million).
3. So how many gasoline-powered cars does the city own that will eventually need to be replaced?
That’s part of the issue. We know the total amount of money Baltimore is spending on its fleet, but they won’t release any more details. We don't even know how many electric cars they currently own.
We filed an open records request in early January to find out how many cars the city owned and who’s driving them.
They ignored our request and several follow-ups until June, when they sent us a list of 12 cars - even though their own
website says the city has 5,600 vehicles.
Since then we’ve reached out directly to the General Services department multiple times to ask them why so much data is missing, but they’ve ignored all our emails.
We’re considering filing a lawsuit to force Baltimore to release the data.
If taxpayers are going to buy electric vehicles for the entire city fleet, they deserve to know what they’re funding.