The Senate bill that would have suspended two of the 34-hour restart provisions included in the 2013-implemented federal hours-of-service rule was pulled from the Senate floor June 19 after disagreements over procedural rules prevented the bill from moving forward for debate.
The annual Transportation, Housing and Urban Development bill – which provides the Department of Transportation with its 2015 fiscal year funding – came to the Senate floor this week with an amendment that would have halted the requirement that a driver’s 34-hour restart include two consecutive 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods and the once-per-week limit on the restart, pending a study. That amendment – proposed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) – was added by the Appropriations Committee earlier this month.
Freshman Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), however, had filed an amendment for consideration by the full Senate to strip the bill of the Collins amendment but keep the requirement for further study of the rule’s efficacy.
After Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) couldn’t agree on how to move the bill forward for debate and into the amendment proposition phase (a highly partisan procedural issue over the number of votes needed), Reid pulled the bill from the Senate floor.
It’s unclear when the bill will make its way back to the floor for debate and advancement.
The White House released a statement this week saying it did not support the Collins amendment, but it did not say whether President Obama would veto the bill over it.
The American Trucking Associations this week said it was “very confident” the Collins amendment would prevail. It also said it was confident the amendment would hold through the conference committee process, when the House and Senate confer to work out differences between their two versions of the bill.
ATA did say it was “disappointed” that the bill was pulled, adding that the Collins amendment is “sound policy.”
“It is overwhelmingly bipartisan and when it’s ultimately enacted into law, it will help keep our nation’s highways safe,” ATA said in a statement.
The House’s version did not include the suspension of the restart provisions, but it did include language that would prevent the agency from moving forward with its rule to increase the minimum amount of liability insurance motor carriers are required to have.
It also did not include language in the Senate bill that would require the agency to produce a Safety Fitness Determination rule by December and a final electronic logging device mandate rule by Jan. 30, 2015.
By a 21-9 vote, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved an amendment introduced by Senator Susan Collins of Maine at the behest of ATA as well as the federation and HOS coalition partners that would suspend two provisions that limit the use of the 34-hour restart.
The provisions, limiting drivers to one restart per week and requiring the restart include two periods of rest between 1am and 5am, have caused unjustified harm to the trucking industry and to drivers but their impacts were not fully studied by FMCSA prior to issuing the rule.
The amendment to the annual funding bill for the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development in committee is the first step in the process. The bill now goes to the Senate floor, where once passed it must be reconciled with a similar bill in the House. ATA will continue to press for the amendment’s inclusion in the final bill that will fund DOT for the 2015 Fiscal Year.
Today’s success is one important step in the process, but it would not have been possible without the hard work of many ATA members, Federation partners, and ATA professional staff who reached out to many, many Senators on the industry’s behalf.
To read ATA’s press release on the amendment’s passage, click here.
Get ready – approximately 10,000 inspectors from federal, state, and local agencies will be conducting a 72 hour blitz at 1500 inspection stations across the US.
Get ready by downloading and reviewing the CVSA Roadcheck Checklist here.
TITLE V Motor Carrier Safety
Take a look at this year’s highway bill, and how it affects trucking. Read the bill, and notify your congressional representative or trade organization to respond.
Arlington, VA – The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) today launched a data collection initiative to update the 2013 Operational Costs of Trucking report. Through a brief online survey, ATRI seeks to capture basic cost information from for-hire carriers such as driver pay, fuel costs, insurance premiums and lease or purchase payments. Carriers are asked to provide full year 2013 cost per mile and cost per hour data.
The results of this data collection, combined with the previous Operational Costs of Trucking reports, will yield six full years (2008 – 2013) of trucking cost information derived directly from fleet operations. This research provides carriers with an important high-level benchmarking tool and government agencies with real world data for future infrastructure improvement analyses.
For-hire motor carriers are encouraged to provide confidential operational cost data through ATRI’s survey, available online at www.atri-online.org. The results of this study will be available later this year.
ATRI is the trucking industry’s 501(c)(3) not-for-profit research organization. It is engaged in critical research relating to freight transportation’s essential role in maintaining a safe, secure and efficient transportation system.
This year there are four proposals to amend the International Fuel Tax Agreement. Three of them are probably of limited interest to motor carriers, but the other, which has to do with IFTA’s rules for audit and record keeping, should be of great interest to the industry.
That amendment is the third (FTPBP #3-2014 in IFTA’s code for these things). It’s sponsored by IFTA’s Audit Committee, and represents several years of work by representatives of IFTA’s member jurisdictions and of the trucking industry, including this writer. This amendment also represents a more or less complete rewrite and rearrangement of IFTA’s provisions in these two areas.
One of the goals of the project was to make IFTA’s rules in this regard as close as possible to those of the International Registration Plan following that organization’s similar effort, which went into effect last year. Like IRP’s, then, IFTA’s new rules on record keeping are somewhat more flexible for carriers, allowing them to maintain their records in any format that allows an audit to be done, and specifically accommodating records created in part through the use of GPS or some similar vehicle-tracking technology.
Provided a carrier’s records are of the quantity and quality necessary for an audit to be done, the jurisdiction doing the audit may not impose a general penalty for bad records – although of course audit adjustments may still be made that may increase the carrier’s tax liability. In the main, the proposed IFTA rules for auditing distance are to be the same as those in effect on the IRP side. Few changes are proposed with respect to the rules for fuel records, however, as these were on the whole found to be satisfactory as they stand currently.
In addition to these changes, and incidental revisions of IFTA language to make it clearer, the project largely rewrote the IFTA Audit Manual, which provides the states and provinces guidance on audit programs and their auditors with procedures for auditing specific situations. These changes, it is hoped, will make IFTA audits on the whole somewhat more uniform, and prevent some questionable practices by a few states.
This is an amendment industry should strongly support.
The other three ballots are as follows:
FTPBP #1 would change the cycle for IFTA program compliance (peer) reviews of the states and provinces from five years to four. If anything, this is a positive change, since it may help to ensure that instances of noncompliance with IFTA’s rules on the part of a state or province will have less time to become significant.
FTPBP #2, like No. 1, is sponsored by IFTA’s Program Compliance Review Committee. No. 2 would make a state’s noncompliance with (a) IFTA requirements to provide information to carriers or (b) the requirement for IFTA base-state audits even-handed for all jurisdictions grounds to take the offending state to IFTA Dispute Resolution Committee for potential disciplinary measures. Since we believe that all issues of noncompliance ought to be subject to such measures, we’re for this one too.
FTPBP #4, sponsored by IFTA’s Audit Committee, would make a definitional change that affects slightly the scope of an IFTA audit. From industry’s point of view, this seems wholly a technical change.
All these ballots are posted on IFTA’s website, at www.iftach.org, under IFTA Ballot Proposals, and are open for public comment through June 12. After that, they’ll be discussed at IFTA’s annual business meeting in August, and, if they survive that, will go out for a second comment period before being voted on this fall by the IFTA membership. ATA expects to file comments on the ballots during the first and possibly also the second period.
