ATA’s Osiecki offers up organization’s view of trucking’s regulatory landscape

A conference call hosted by investment firm Stifel Nicolaus last week that featured Dave Osiecki, Executive Vice President & Head of Advocacy at the American Trucking Associations (ATA) provided a detailed insight into the overall outlook for the trucking industry in terms of regulations and politics that can impact the industry going forward.

Looking at the mid-term elections, Osiecki said that should the Republican party take control of the Senate it would be helpful in one regard and perhaps not helpful in another.

“Republicans…would probably oversee the regulatory pipeline differently than the Democrats have been,” he said. “They could hold more oversight hearings and have administrators at regulatory agencies answering more tough questions and kind of slow down the regulatory process by asking those tough questions and seeking more information. That is a potential benefit to the trucking industry to the extent that we think maybe there is some over-regulation going on. But on the flip side, we know the Republicans are not inclined to raise taxes, particularly the fuel tax which many in the trucking industry want to see raised.”

If the Republicans do take control, he said it could represent a mixed bag for the trucking sector.

Looking at the Highway Trust Fund (HTF), whose revenues are generated by the federal gasoline and diesel tax, which has not been raised since 1993, Osiecki explained that it has failed to keep up with actual highway needs for maintenance, construction and new building needs, which has seen Congress have to pump more than $65 billion from outside funding sources since 2008 to keep the HTF solvent.

In August, the HTF balance dropped to about $1 billion, which was set to trigger what Osiecki called cost-management procedures that have never been used by the fderal government, and it also led to states slowing down projects. But prior to the August recess for Congress, another $11 billion from the U.S. general fund was transferred into the HTF through a practice known as pension smoothing, which will keep the HTF financially upright through the end of May 2015.

Future U.S. general fund transfers to the HTF appears to be the practice that has the most support, according to Osiecki, but he noted that it appears Congress has some interest looking at the federal fuel tax.

While raising the fuel tax, which would appear to be the most direct way of increasing HTF revenue is not an option due to the political climate, Osiecki said indexing it to some measure that would allow it to increase annually, whether it is through CPI or a construction cost index, or a fuel economy index, among others, could be possible options. Moving the tax to the wholesaler level, which has been looked at on a state level, was an additional option cited by Osiecki, as well as an oil barrel tax or potentially new types of leasing royalties, which he said has gotten some traction in Washington.

“ATA is a big supporter of increasing the fuel tax and then indexing it going forward,” said Osiecki.

Given the lack of political progress in this session of Congress, Osiecki said the motor carrier hours-of-service 34-hour restart rule, which was changed in July 2013, was not justified by the government well enough, leading to the ATA working the Senate appropriations process over the first six months of the year, which led to 14 Republican and 7 Democratic senators siding with the ATA in that the HOS restart rule does not seem to be justified well enough, which he said is good news.

But the bad news, according to Osiecki, is that the trucking industry has not seen relief as Congress has not passed the Transportation Housing and Urban Development bill, which contains language designed to overturn the restart.

With a pending lame-duck Congressional session to follow the mid-term elections, he said the ATA is hopeful Congress will take up an omnibus appropriations bill approach, which he said would suspend the HOS restart language for a year in the appropriations process to study the restart and do the research that should have been done prior to the rule taking effect.

For the next session of Congress, Osiecki defined the following as some of the key parts of its agenda for the trucking industry:
-shoring up the Highway Trust Fund to move forward on a new surface transportation reauthorization and trying to get Congress to pass a long-term bill of at least 5-to-6 years, generate new income sources, and include a focus on freight;
-if successful with the appropriations process, get one-year relief from the HOS restart and “park” the restart rule in the broader reauthorization package and get the longer-term relief the industry is seeking;
-electronic logging device implementations to be overseen by Congress;
-get needed improvements for CSA, which he said are needed;
-the mandatory use of speed limiters;
-the oversight of a drug and alcohol clearing house and hair testing for drivers;
-addressing the driver shortage;
-industry tax reform; and
-a truck size provision led by a coalition of LTL carriers calling for twin-33-foot trailers as opposed to the current use of twin-23-foot trailers