Byline: Todd
Dills
At a meeting
of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Aug. 27 in Alexandria, Va., FMCSA Government Affairs
Director John Drake updated the committee on provisions of the MAP-21 highway
bill that would require agency action over the next two years and three months,
the bill’s duration.
“Our budget
may have remained relatively flat” compared to previous funding levels under
SAFETEA-LU, said FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro,
but the bill “gave a significant bump in safety…. We’re all extremely excited
about the initiatives that MAP-21 enables – much of it was [on] our program’s
agenda.”
Among those
initiatives on FMCSA’s agenda was the electronic log mandate, which Drake
confirmed was on the agency’s schedule to reach Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
stage in March of next year, proceeding to a final rule by October.
The EOBR
mandate, first proposed in different form decades ago, was among the highway
bill’s most controversial provisions. Reflecting that long history and joining
others among skeptics of the schedule, “timelines are sometimes not exactly
predictable,” said Committee member and Owner-Operator Independent Drivers
Association Executive Vice President Todd Spencer. “There are things that can
happen along the way.”
One item on
the agency’s program agenda that was not included in the highway bill was
expanded authority over drivers relative to making its Compliance Safety
Accountability’s Driver Safety Measurement System available for public view,
said FMCSA Associate Administrator for Enforcement Bill Quade. “One day we may
consider doing publicly available driver-scoring systems,” he elaborated,
noting “there are many complications that would go along with a driver scoring
system,” among them the Privacy Act and other protections of individuals’
identifying information. “We asked Congress in MAP-21 to make [additional FMCSA
authorities] crystal clear, but they didn’t.”
Also on the
agency’s docket is issuance of an NPRM relative to the longstanding goal of utilizing
carriers’ SMS results to compute a final Safety Fitness Determination for
companies, Drake said. He expected the NPRM would be available for comment as
early as January 2013.
Quade said in
a briefing on the CSA system that “we will propose an absolute scale” for
ratings in the Safety Fitness Determination, “not a relative scale” like the
SMS BASIC (Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Category) numbers. One of
the challenges they’re dealing with is “finding a threshold level that does not
change month to month.”
MAP-21, Drake
said, requires agency completion of “29 rulemakings over the 27-month life of
the bill,” a significantly more dense schedule than the previous five-year
highway bill’s 36 directed rulemakings.
As of October
1 this year, when MAP-21 goes into effect, FMCSA will gain expanded authority
to deal with reincarnated and otherwise high-risk carriers to effectively shut
companies down, Drake said. “The way the provision is crafted is in two parts —
beginning October 1, if the agency finds a carrier to be an imminent hazard,”
not only can FMCSA order the company to cease operations, it will gain
enforcement powers to tow and/or impound company vehicles. In future, ”there is
potential to expand that imminent hazard authority,” he added.
Said
Administrator Ferro, “It’s intended for those who defy logic and continue to
operate after we’ve shut them down. We’re trying to get to the worst of the
worst.”
Other
provisions expected to see action over the next year:
- Rulemaking and updates to the Unified Registration System, which will include expanded authority over freight forwarders and brokers and their new surety bond and reporting requirements.
- Establishing of the drug and alcohol clearinghouse.
- Updates to the newly establishing National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners designed to facilitate state reporting to FMCSA of driver medical qualification data.
- Extension of the MCSAC’s charter through 2013. Said Administrator Ferro, “We thought it was a good opportunity to look at the terms and membership process…. It would include two-year terms renewable only one time with a maximum. It will provide those of you that have been serving diligently from the beginning a break as well.”
Visit
www.mcsac.fmcsa.dot.gov for more information.
