NEW SCOTLAND — After years of unsuccessful attempts, New Scotland Senior Liaison Deb Engel’s indefatigable nature won out as she recently secured a $120,000 grant from the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York to purchase a new bus for the town’s senior citizens.

“I have to say it’s actually kind of lightning speed for DASNY to approve this so quickly …,” Councilman Dan Leinung said during the town board’s November meeting. “I give a lot of credit to Deb for literally finding who the person was in charge of this at DASNY, and literally weekly calling them and leaving messages for them.”

New Scotland’s senior transportation capabilities have been at half capacity since 2020 when it was determined repairing one of the town’s two senior buses would be too expensive, which led to the town board declaring it surplus and the bus being sold at auction.

Engel told board members in May 2023 that, since the bus was taken off the road three years earlier, she had “been attempting nonstop to secure funding through three submissions of grants on behalf of the town.”

“Obviously,” her attempts hadn’t been successful, Engel said at the time. 

The senior transportation dilemma was further compounded by the fact that the town’s only senior bus had seen better days. 

“We’re trying to salvage it so that we can continue to use it,” Engel told The Enterprise in October 2022, when the bus, which is from 2009 and had about 50,000 miles on it, was having work done; the exhaust system was rusted out.

In September 2022, the town board passed a resolution allowing New Scotland to accept private donations to help pay for the uncovered portion of a grant Engel had applied for; the award would have been for 80 percent of the bus’s cost, about $90,000.

In May 2023, a group of elderly residents showed up at a workshop being held to gather feedback for how the town should allocate its remaining pandemic federal relief funds and asked the board members to set aside some of that money for a new bus. The board eventually allocated $50,000 toward the purchase. 

ARPA

One item on the agenda of the town board’s November meeting was to discuss how New Scotland’s remaining American Rescue Plan Act funds should be spent. The board has to allocate the federal funding before the end of the year, or risk losing it.

The first of two roughly $300,000 ARPA payments came during the summer of 2021, with the town receiving the second a year later. 

So far, the allocations include:

— $199,000 for playground equipment at two of the town’s parks, on Swift Road and in Feura Bush;

— $155,675 for four change orders at the Hilton Barn project;

— $50,000 for a senior bus;

 — $30,685 to install a chain-link fence at the town’s Clarksville wells:

— $23,000 to streamline the town’s general code; and

— $3,400 for equipment to livestream town meetings. 

Supervisor Douglas LaGrange said he “listed a couple of projects” in an email to board members “that I would like to do. One project here in Town Hall, and I can’t remember what the other one was.”

He then said, “Because we saw a lot of increase in costs after we had applied for the state grant for the Hilton Park — we've seen substantial increases because of that — my thought is to direct a majority of these funds to that to make up some of those costs so we continue on the path we’ve been on.”

Councilman William Hennessy responded to LaGrange, stating he didn’t want to “put all our eggs in that one basket,” adding, “We have to talk about the senior bus.”

He said now that the town had $120,000 to purchase a 14-passenger bus, perhaps “we can leverage this 50 [thousand] into something else. We should look at a smaller vehicle, whether it’s a car or an SUV or a van.”

After some more discussion among board members, Engel was asked her thoughts on what type of vehicle the town should purchase.

It just so happened she already had some ideas. 

“I was going to come tonight to ask for a little bit more money from ARPA, because I went through what figures we had, [and] to replace the second bus, right now we have $50,000 that came from ARPA funds from the town. We also acquired $15,000 from the village. And the seniors donated amongst themselves over the last year and a half, $15,500.”

She said, “That gives us $80,500 towards the purchase of a $110,000 bus,” so that’s why “I’m asking if it’s possible that we could get the balance to get the second bus.”

Engel said she didn’t mind “asking the guy to give us more of a break and/or modify the resolution that was already in place for the $50,000,” because she’s “not timid in asking for things; I do hound people, but I do my homework, too.”

LaGrange concluded the conversation stating, “I think we’re going to circle back on this for our next meeting, to hammer out exactly what [the $50,000] is going to be used for.”