ALBANY, N.Y. — New York State is pushing school districts to get moving on the switch to electric buses. They must stop buying diesel buses by 2027 and stop using diesel buses by 2035.

But as News10NBC Investigative Reporter Jennifer Lewke shows us, those are lofty goals considering most districts don’t even have a single electric bus in the fleet yet.

“Well, first and foremost, electric buses are expensive, about three-times the cost of a traditional diesel bus. So, to start with, it’s a money issue for most districts,” Lewke said.

As News10NBC has been reporting, the Gates Chili School District qualified for some early funding from New York State to test out electric buses. It’s got five full-sized electric buses in a fleet of about 80 and has had a good experience with them. But they were only able to afford them because the state kicked in the cost difference between the old and new.

“The money that the state and the feds offer to sort of off-set the cost, that has to keep flowing or else you’re going to have to ask for a lot of money from taxpayers to completely redo the fleet,” Lewke said to Matt Helmbold, Gates Chili transportation director.

“Correct,” Helmbold responded.

According to the Empire Center, it’ll cost between $8 and $15 billion to switch out all of New York’s school buses to electric ones. So far, the governor has only put aside $500 million to help.

The commissioner of the Department of Transportation was in Rochester recently, so Lewke asked her about it.

“We’ve done some stories with school districts around here who are a bit concerned about the electric bus mandate that’s coming down the line. Have you heard those concerns? Do you have concerns that that’s an actually attainable goal?” Lewke asked.

“I do believe that it is, we’re working right now with NYSERDA which is the state agency that has the lead on this from a state perspective, we’re working with and partnering with them as well as, what we’re doing is taking the state funds that have been dedicated to this and matching it with the federal funds that are available and looking at how we can actually make sure that we’re granting dollars to communities across the state to actually achieve those electric bus goals that we’ve set for New York State. They’re very aggressive but for a reason, we want to make sure that people have the ability to access funds to get us to this zero emissions level,” the commissioner responded.

The state says the price of electric buses and charging stations is coming down and the technology is getting better so they believe the goal should be feasible over the next decade.

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