Montville - The school system is looking to begin to replace its fleet of school buses using a combination of grants and local funding, according to Superintendent Brian Levesque.

"We've got an aging bus fleet," Levesque said last week.

He said the district hasn't purchased a new bus since 2012. The district owns 38 buses, some of which date back to the 1990s.

The district accepted a federal grant in December, which would provide up to $100,000 to replace up to five buses with a subsidy of $20,000 a bus. It has also included bus replacement in its list of capital improvement funding requests for the 2015-16 fiscal year.

The grant is available for two to three more months, according to Levesque. He said the district must take advantage of the subsidy within that time if it wishes to replace five 1997 and 2000 model buses at lower cost.

Assuming a roughly $80,000 price tag per new bus, Levesque said he believed the district could cover the cost of three new buses with the roughly $185,000 in the district's non-lapsing fund. The grant would cover $60,000 of the cost.

He hopes the town will be willing to cover the roughly $120,000 that would be needed to cover the cost of purchasing another two buses. The funds would have to come from the current budget, due to the expiration date of the grant.

The district is requesting another $80,000 in its 2015-16 capital projects budget for bus replacement and more funding in years to come.

Levesque said that in past years the town had not funded most of the district's capital project requests due to budgetary constraints.

The district's capital project budget is planned to include five years of hoped-for projects. None of the 20 projects for which the district requested funding for in the 2011-16 capital improvement budget received town funding, according to district Business Manager Kathy Lamoureux. A total of three projects from the 2012-17, 2013-18 and 2014-19 capital budgets were funded by the town, according to the business manager.

An additional project was slated to receive some town funding but was ultimately funded through a combination of state grant and district money, Lamoureux said.

Mayor Ronald McDaniel said he had plans to meet with Levesque this week to discuss possible funding for the buses.

"We will just maintain an open dialogue and we'll take a careful look at everything," he said.

He said that the town had finite funding for capital projects in general and that he did not anticipate a great availability of state grants to help cover such costs.

t.townsend@theday.com

Twitter: @ConnecticuTess