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Ed Huestis isn't a fleet maintenance manager--by title, he's a systems manager for the City of Vacaville Department of Public Works--so you might wonder why his story is appearing on the pages of Fleet Maintenance magazine. Then again, you wouldn't have to wonder at all if you were one of the many fleet managers in California asking Huestis to come and give a presentation on how to reduce your fleet's fuel consumption and fuel costs by switching to renewable energy.

Huestis is in great demand. He spends a lot of his evenings traveling around the region, explaining to fleet managers how he single-handedly made Vacaville a mecca for electric highway vehicles in the early 1990s, to the point where the city once boasted the greatest number of electric highway vehicles per-capita of any city in the United States (back then, the local press dubbed Vacaville "Voltageville," and the nickname has stuck).

"They want to do something," Huestis says of his colleagues, "they just don't know what to do and how to do it."

But helping other fleets see the light is not the whole of Huestis' accomplishment. In a state that is known for its car culture, Huestis has convinced hundreds of city managers, city employees and residents of his entire county to abandon gasoline- and diesel-powered transportation in favor of alternative-fuel vehicles.

GRANTS ADMINISTRATOR PLUS

Ed Huestis is a modest guy. He says that all he does is administer grants, but that's like Superman saying he's just a guy who can jump pretty high.

He was employed by Vacaville in 1992 to adminsiter the Trip Reduction Rule, a California State program that mandated major employers to reduce the number of trips made by employees to the worksite. "But that phased out when there was a lot of ruffling of feathers, and the employers said they didn't want anything mandatory like this," he says. "Somehow they got it watered down to where it was done on a voluntary basis."

But Huestis wasn't out of a job. The city had a need for a grants administrator to bring in state and federal money for capital improvement projects, and Huestis got the position. One of the money sources he identified was the state's CMAQ (Congestion, Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement) Program, which disburses grants for transportation projects that affect air quality. That could mean building a bike path through town, or it could mean buying an electric vehicle for the city's fleet.

Coincidentally, General Motors had recently introduced the EV1 electric coupe to the California market, and Huestis and his wife had been among the first customers to sign up.

"When we started seeing the ads for the EV1, it was about $600 a month in Los Angeles," Huestis recalls. "I said, 'There's no way I'm going to pay that kind of price to get into an EV1.' But they came down, and offered some incentives, and it got down to about $399, and I said, 'Let's do this.'"

"When we took delivery in August of '98, we had a Ride-n-Drive event, and it was fantastic; 0-60 in less than eight seconds?" he exclaims. "My wife and I were having to build more time into when we went shopping, because we would get out of the car and people would be asking us about it, because it was so unique. Then, when we came back out to the car, people would be asking us about it. And we'd see fingerprints all over the windows, because people would be peering inside.

"I was happy to do that," he says, "but I thought, what if I had 10 or 15 people taking the time to explain things to people to raise the awareness level, to show people that electric cars exist, you can go to the Saturn dealership and you can actually lease this vehicle? So the seed was planted; we wanted everyone to be driving this car."

CAN IT BE DONE?

So Ed Huestis had an idea that no one had ever had before. What if he really could get everyone into an EV1?

"People were saying they would get one if it didn't cost so much," he says, "so I started thinking, 'I might be able to use some grant money for this… let me see how I can do this.'"

It wouldn't be easy.

"CalTrans administers the CMAQ dollars," Huestis explains. "They get the money from the feds, but at the state level they approve the projects, and then we work with local assistance groups to define the scope of the project. Even though CalTrans headquarters had already approved the project, the local assistance guys said 'We've never done this before. This must not be eligible.' Real status quo kind of thing."

But Huestis and the status quo don't get along real well. It wasn't long before Huestis was appealing to CalTrans headquarters to talk some sense into the local authorities, and allow him to use CMAQ funds to buy down the cost of electric vehicles for Vacaville residents as well as the city fleet. "HQ got back to the local assistance group and said 'We want our name attached to this. You go back to Vacaville and do this,'" he says.

"No one had ever done this before, using this pot of money to buy the cost down for the public," Huestis explains. "You can use it for the fleets, but EV1 didn't seem to be appropriate for most fleets. But we certainly wanted our residents to be driving these in town. And we didn't want the public to see us driving alternative fuel vehicles in the city fleet and saying, 'See, they get to do that, but what about us?'

"So I was always trying to put myself in the position of our residents, because I am one," he says. "We need to have these driven on the freeway. We need people to see these on the freeway so they know, 'Okay, there is something else out there. I should look into this.'"

So, within certain restrictions--the money has to be for public good, and it can only go towards the incremental costs--Huestis set up a program where the city would offer residents a $5,000 buydown on the vehicle and $1,000 to put the charger in the garage. "(CalTrans) said we couldn't offer the $1,000 because the charger at home only benefits the individual," Huestis says. "So, I said, 'Okay, we'll make it $6,000 for buying the car, and they can spend it any way they want,' and that was acceptable to them."

And so, the City of Vacaville Electric Vehicle Program was born. "At least nobody else has to go through that drill that we had to go through," Huestis concludes. "It took six months to get it approved."
Now he just needed two things: people and cars.

RARING TO GO

With $300,000 in funding for 1999, Huestis went right to work getting electric vehicles into Vacaville driveways, and building public charging stations all over town.

"Because we wanted several people to get into that vehicle by the end of the year--there were some Federal tax breaks available, and people wanted to take advantage of that--there were five of us who got approval on December 21, and took delivery on Christmas," he says. Those five GM EV1 electric coupes came with nickel-metal-hydride batteries instead of lead acid batteries; this gave the vehicles greater range than previous models, but the batteries also got quite hot. Kind of a problem in central California, but Huestis and his acolytes were overjoyed to have such a problem if it meant not spending a cent on gasoline.

At the same time the electric vehicles were appearing around town, public charging stations were springing up all over the place. Huestis felt it was necessary to have public charging stations readily accessible at every Vacaville exit along I-80, but a few other locations became just as important as the process developed.