For decades, the city of Rome ran school buses that looked like public buses, with no stop arms and nothing to stop passing traffic. And the city leaned on the federal government to pay for the fleet.
Now, taxpayers will take a massive hit because Washington says its transit dollars shouldn’t have been spent ferrying school kids that way.
The northwest Georgia city had been running the buses for about 30-40 years, the city manager said. Until six years ago, Rome’s students rode in 28 white-painted and blue-striped “tripper” buses bought with Federal Transit Administration funds.
But then a 2019 audit by the Georgia Department of Transportation turned up bad news: That money wasn’t supposed to be for school bus service, but for regular bus service. The state informed FTA.
