Seeking to reverse California’s decade-long trend of using standard gasoline in its alternative fuel fleet, the Legislature recently passed a bill that would push the vehicles to run on the environmentally-friendly fuels they were designed to use, the San Jose Mercury News reports. The bill, AB 236, was rewritten over the past month to address problems exposed by a MediaNews investigation that showed the state's 6,000-plus alternative fuel fleet runs almost entirely on standard gasoline. The worst record is with a set of flex-fuel cars and trucks, purchased by the Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger administration over the past two years. Not a single drop of the high-grade ethanol, that was supposed to turn the vehicles into "green" machines, had been burned by the new fleet at the time the MediaNews investigation ran in early July. According to the San Jose Mercury News, the state is now encouraging government employees to use California's one public ethanol station in San Diego and on a pump offering E85 - a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline – was recently opened in the state garage, a few blocks from the Capitol.
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