Sponsored by SKYBITz SKYBITz.com | 866.922.4708 fact that the things we are working on in Washington will help to keep freight moving safely and efficiently. Many of the drivers crossing the border were driving power units that were what, about 20 years old, Chris? Chris: If not more. TLA: Backing up a little bit — and I’ll say this, since I’ve been in trucking, this is my third presidential transition — it seems as though the bills and the regulatory process are the slowest of any of those years. That said, the president says two for one. We’ve got to kick out two regulations for every new one. How can that happen in an environment in trucking where everything, just about, relates back to safety? John: That’s a good point, these actions need to be considered carefully and comprehensively when it comes to safety, and the same goes for anything else that might be reviewed. Chris: The two-for-one executive order’s going to be really tough to enforce, literally. It’s already receiving some court challenges. The two-for-one doesn’t need to be all trucking. You could take two rules unrelated to trucking in exchange for one that is trucking. It’s kind of a mix and match as to how that would work. It’s not as easy as it sounds. The administration has no authority to go in and just wipe the slate clean. To take down a regulation you have to propose another rule to pull it down. And in that new proposal you have to explain why the current one needs to be pulled down. And it can’t be just because you don’t like it. It has to be based on fact, science, data, and in our world, a lot of it is safety. You’ve got to have very strong justification because if you don’t, it’s going to get challenged in court; it will get tossed. Going in willy-nilly and just saying you want to take stuff out, it doesn’t work that way. So it sounds better than it is, in practice. I think it’s a lot more complicated and that’s probably why the courts would be going back to take a look at this to see if it’s permissible, if it violates the Administrative Procedures Act. These are things that are going to come under a lot of scrutiny. As far as our view of it, we’re not afraid of regulation; we just want good sound regulation, regulation we can understand and comply with. When you pump out a rule like the July 2013 Hours of Service changes with back-to-back 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. periods and the 168 hours, this is based on a too-weak sleep study in a graduate school up in Washington state. Now if you’re going to change the regulatory framework for an entire industry, do your homework, OK? Do it right, do it in a way that our industry can understand and comply with. That wasn’t the case here and we bounced it. It took us three years but we got it done. So we’re not afraid of a fight; we’re not afraid of regulation. We just want good, clear regulation and want to be in the process itself, so include us. Let us help you with it. We’ll tell you what works and what doesn’t work. We could have told you from the beginning that it wasn’t going to work. John: Chris, I agree with you. Being involved by being at the table to arrive at solid solutions is a business imperative. Instead of looking comprehensively at how to move freight safely and efficiently across North America, in the past we’ve had patchwork solutions put in place that do not take into consideration all of the facts that are necessary in arriving at a forward-thinking decision. TLA: What are some of the common issues that TCA and ATA are aligned on? Chris: I think we named some of them right here. F4A, obviously, out of the gate. That’s a near-term goal that we both share for our members. I think on infrastructure we’re perfectly aligned. Tax reform impacts our members almost identically. Trade and some of these broader, bigger issues are very encompassing of both ATA and TCA, and down to a very surgical issue like F4A we see a lot of alignment. By segmentation you always see some areas of specialty where an issue becomes more of a priority to say, truckload, than it does to a broader federation like ATA, in which we represent not just truckload but LTL and flatbed, tank trucks and so on. Tankers obviously led the charge on wetlines; it’s an issue that’s specific to them and they’re going to drive and advocate that as well as the TWIC card issue, and having that as the go-to identification for entering sensitive sites. And they’re the best equipped to tell that story. Truckload does the same thing in areas that are specific to their segment. So when we draw 20 Truckload Authority | www.Truckload.org TCA 2017
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