Measure Twice Cut Once

Columbia REA’s Vision and Planning Pay Off With Seamless Expansion of Walla Walla Public Schools’ EV Bus Charging Station.

Almost exactly 2 years ago, in May of 2023, the Walla Walla Public School District unveiled its first electric school bus. On that day, as the school district hosted an open house to show off the 2 new charging stations installed by Columbia REA, Bryan Maas, CREA engineer, was pretty excited about what he saw with his own eyes, and what he saw in his own mind.

“This was a well-executed job,” said Bryan 2 years ago, “but we also know that this isn’t where this project is going to end.”

Fast forward to June 9, 2025. WWPS Superintendent Dr. Wade Smith introduced the community to an entire fleet of electric school buses at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Southeastern Washington Transportation Cooperative; 18 buses in total, to be supported by an additional 16 charging stations… no installation required this time.

Through collaboration with WW Public Schools and other agencies, Bryan and the rest of the engineering team at Columbia REA had already planned for the day when additional chargers would be needed.

“The planning that we put into this project, starting about 3 years ago, paid off, added Bryan. “No additional infrastructure was required to add the 16 new chargers. No digging up asphalt, no outages required to add hardware and bring more capacity. Electricians were able to just plug the additional charging stations into the system that was put in place in 2023.”

But what turned out so easy now was not so easy in the beginning.

“Projects like this present a unique challenge. When we bring electricity to a new housing development or even just a single home or street, we are pretty good at anticipating the growth potential of a single residential home or group of homes, shared Bryan.

“This EV bus charging station was a pretty large project in terms of the amount of electricity it would require. The other aspect of it was that EV technology was, and still is, rapidly evolving, so we had to ask ourselves, ‘how much time and money do we want to commit to future growth when we might not know exactly what that growth will look like?’”

“In the end, we got it right. It’s rewarding to see a project of this magnitude come together the way we envisioned it 3 years ago when we started on it.”