In The News
OOIDA sues FMCSA over Final Rule on ELDs
GRAIN VALLEY, Mo. — The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association is once again taking the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to court over the agency's efforts to require electronic logging devices in commercial motor vehicles.
In an article published Monday in Land Line, the organization's magazine, OOIDA called the FMCSA's Final Rule requiring ELDs in all commercial vehicles a "heavy-handed mandate."
The new Final Rule was issued Thursday and will become official when it is published in the Federal Register Wednesday.
The article said that the day after the Final Rule was issued, OOIDA filed a Petition for Review with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
"This rule has potential to have the single largest, most negative impact on the industry than anything else FMCSA has done," OOIDA President Jim Johnston told Land Line. "We intend to fight this with all the resources we have available."
In the article, Johnston challenged the justifications the agency and anti-trucking groups have used to promote the mandated use of the devices.
"This regulation is absolutely the most outrageous intrusion into the rights of professional truckers imaginable and will do nothing at all to improve highway safety. In fact, we firmly believe it will do exactly the opposite by placing even more pressure and stress on drivers than they already deal with," Johnston said. "While they choose to call it electronic logging systems, in reality it is an electronic monitoring system for law enforcement purposes. They can't even do this to known criminals without a court issued warrant."
The first time OOIDA took the FMCSA on was in 2010 when the association sued over the previous attempt by FMCSA to mandate electronic log use by companies with a safety history that reflected a 10 percent or greater level of noncompliance in one compliance review with the Hours of Service regulations, saying the rule did not adequately address the potential use of ELDs (called Electronic On-Board Recorders at that time) to harass drivers.
In fact, that rule did not even include the word harassment.
In August 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit vacated the rule and sent FMCSA back to the drawing board.
In the previous lawsuit, the association presented three arguments against the mandated use of the devices.
The court had considered the first of the three – the harassment issue – when the three-judge panel decided it had enough to order the rule vacated.
OOIDA filed suit against the agency, contending that the rule was arbitrary and capricious because it does not "ensure that the devices are not used to harass vehicle operators," as required by law.
Rather than revamp the limited-use logging final rule, the FMCSA scrapped that rule after the court threw it out and issued the full-mandate final rule last week.
That rule includes the use of the word "harassment" over 200 times in one form or another.
The Land Line article said OOIDA's Petition for Review on the new final rule filed on Dec. 11 does not outline the arguments the association plans to challenge the rule on in court.
The Cullen Law Firm, OOIDA's litigation counsel, anticipates a schedule for filings and arguments in the next couple of weeks. The article said the association's arguments against the rule will be laid out in the subsequent filings and during oral arguments in front of the court.
"We knocked it down last time. Our goal is the same this time," Johnston told Land Line.
The Trucker staff can be reached to comment on this article at [email protected].