At the end of the Tuesday, March 15 City Council meeting, Mayor Nancy Vaughan thanked Sen. Thom Tillis and 6th District Congresswoman Kathy Manning for funding for Greensboro included in the Omnibus Budget Bill recently passed by Congress.

According to a press release, the City of Greensboro received over $10 million in funding for workforce development, an innovation district, public safety and transit services in the massive federal budget bill.

The city received over $3 million in transit funds and a portion of that money will be used to purchase four electric buses to replace older diesel buses.  Greensboro currently has 17 electric buses in its 55-bus fleet and was the first transit system in the state to make the move to electric buses when it added 10 electric buses to the fleet in early 2019.

The major savings in electric buses for the city is not in fuel costs, as many people assume, but in maintenance costs.  The plan announced in 2019 was to convert the entire fleet to electric buses. The addition of four electric buses will bring the fleet close to 50 percent electric, or almost halfway there.

Greensboro received $3 million for a computer-aided dispatch system at Guilford Metro 911.

The city also received $3 million for the Greensboro Innovation District, which is a designated area designed to attract new businesses and create high paying jobs.

And Greensboro received $1.6 million for workforce development initiatives including technology and support services.

Vaughan thanked both Democrat Manning and Republican Tillis for the funding in the Omnibus Budget Bill that was passed with bipartisan support by the House and Senate this month.

The federal budget bill totaled over $1.5 trillion, so $10,000,000 for Greensboro, although much appreciated, is hardly a drop in that $1,500,000,000,000 bucket.