TIA urged its membership to voice support for an amendment it says will be offered by Representative Jimmy Duncan (R-Tenn.) on the House floor this week to change language of the bill that specifies selection criteria to include only Satisfactory-rated carriers as essentially safe to do business with.
“The Duncan amendment clarifies that motor carriers who have not been prioritized for a compliance review by FMCSA due to their safe operations are equal in safety status to satisfactory-rated carriers,” TIA’s call to action specifies. The amendment would add Unrated carriers to the mix. The majority of motor carriers, including many independent owner-operators and others among the smallest carriers, are officially Unrated today.
“This amendment is necessary,” TIA says, “to ensure that 447,665 unrated carriers, who are mostly small family-owned businesses, are not penalized by a flawed federal safety rating system.”
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association supports the change in language, according to reporting in OOIDA’s own Land Line magazine Friday, Oct. 30, which the story notes would “shut out ‘unsatisfactory’ rated motor carriers from hauling freight.”
It would, however, also shut out Conditional-rated carriers.
The proposed change does not go as far as the original language of the “hiring standard” provision as introduced by Duncan in 2014 and then supported by TIA, as previously reported. The original language would have required parties contracting with motor carriers to ensure that the carrier had active authority, the required insurance and hadn’t been given an Unsatisfactory safety rating to avoid liability in “negligent selection” lawsuits.
A return to that basic statement of law as it stands was urged by a range of groups from the Western States Trucking Association to the Alliance for Safe, Effective, and Competitive Truck Transportation. They would replace the entire “Interim Hiring Standard” provision with this “affirmation of existing law”:
Unless a motor carrier in the SMS has received an UNSATISFACTORY safety rating pursuant to 49 CFR Part 385, or has otherwise been ordered to discontinue operations by the FMCSA, it is authorized to operate on the nation’s roadways and therefore fit for the shipping public to use.”
As it stands, the language being pushed by Duncan and TIA notably excludes Conditional-rated carriers. Between fiscal year 2011 and the most recently published data available at FMCSA.dot.gov for FY 2015, the agency and its state partners have performed 14,673 compliance reviews that have resulted in the Conditional rating. As was discussed in-depth in 2014 reporting as part of Overdrive‘s “CSA’s Fallout” series, carriers saddled with the Conditional rating, though authorized to continue operating, increasingly find it difficult to obtain a follow-up review from FMCSA after receiving a Conditional rating and making changes to correct problems found. A follow-up review is virtually the only way they can achieve or return to Satisfactory status.
As FMCSA has put more emphasis on its flawed CSA Safety Measurement System as its primary oversight tool, as previously reported, “the agency essentially has abandoned old policies that prioritized follow-up Conditional carrier reviews.”
Find further reading about the situation of Conditional carriers in the following linked story.
from Overdrive http://ift.tt/1GHX6ZC
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