California offers vouchers for landscape equipment

Qualified small business landscape professionals can now purchase discounted zero-emission lawn mowers, blowers and other landscape equipment through a new category of funding offered through the California Air Resources Board’s Clean Off-Road Equipment Voucher Incentive Project (CORE). Administered by CALSTART, the CORE program’s new funding category has an allocation of more than $27 million of voucher funds for professional landscape services operated by small businesses or sole proprietors.

Landscapers in California can receive vouchers toward the purchase of zero-emissions equipment such as this Mean Green electric mower. (Photo: Mean Green)

“Professional landscapers often operate on very tight profit margins and can find it challenging to upgrade to new technology,” said Jacob Whitson, CALSTART’s lead project manager, “CORE’s new landscape voucher incentives will allow them to more easily adopt zero-emission professional equipment for their businesses, while in turn encouraging manufacturers to expand their offerings in this market.”

Equipment purchasers can request vouchers for a broad range of landscape equipment, including walk-behind, riding and stand-on mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, pole saws and vacuums. The vouchers can also be used to purchase batteries, chargers and power management equipment.

The move is part of the state’s plan to ban small off-road engines under 25 hp as of 2024. 

To be eligible, landscapers must have principal operations in California, be independently owned and operated and have 100 or fewer employees and average annual gross receipts of $15 million or less over the previous three years.

The full listing can be found on the CORE website.