BUTLER TOWNSHIP — The Butler Transit Authority approved its 2016-17 capital plan application Wednesday and sent it to the state for its approval.

Part of the $12.3 million budget includes upgrading the existing garage to accommodate compressed natural gas buses — six for local routes and five coach CNG buses for longer trips.

The authority will get its facility under the state Department of Transportation’s Public-Private Partnership project run by The Trillum CNG team.

There will be 29 public transit agency sites statewide funded under the 20-year agreement, which will cost $84.5 million.

The Butler upgrade is scheduled to be finished by 2019. although authority Executive Director John Paul said it could happen sooner.

“We may move up on the timeline, but we don’t know,” he said. “That timeline that PennDOT put out was not set in stone. It depended on need and demand in different transit agencies throughout the state.”

The federal clean fuels grant funding for the facility is $2.4 million, with a $580,650 capital fund and a required local match of $19,350.

The authority already has one local CNG bus and requested five more with a total budget of $3 million. The budget for the coach buses, which would commute to Pittsburgh, is $3.3 million.

“If we got that approval then we would have to move forward on the facility upgrades because we couldn’t maintain or store those buses inside without facility upgrades,” he said.

If the fueling station is not ready by the time the CNG buses arrive, the authority would have to have the fuel brought in.

Also approved at the meeting was the operation budget for the fiscal year 2016-17, which is $1.9 million. That’s $32,000 more than last year.

Paul said that while the authority is under budget this year, and hopes to be next year, the authority raised the budget to plan ahead.

He said nobody knows where the price of fuel is going, so the authority needs to budget to reflect fuel price volatility.

“So, we have to budget properly, because we can’t go back mid-year and ask for more money.”