DC Velocity - May 2014

COMING SOON TO A LEGISLATIVE THEATER NEAR you: Bob Voltmann vs. the Plaintiffs’ Bar.

Voltmann, who runs the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), wants to get trial lawyers off the backs of shippers, property brokers, and motor carriers. In his group’s view, the best and perhaps only way to accomplish this is to convince Congress to enact national standards for hiring truckers to move contractual and spot market freight.

Voltmann reasons that federal legislation would provide everyone with clear guidelines for what constitutes a safe motor carrier. The presence of an overarching federal standard would also dilute the plaintiffs’ bar’s strategy of suing brokers in state court over their role in selecting carriers when those carriers get involved in accidents while hauling their freight, Voltmann said. Trial lawyers have succeeded in recent years in winning state court judgments against brokers by persuading juries that the carrier or driver was either in the broker’s employ at the time of the accident or that the broker was negligent in vetting the carrier’s safety record.

The legislation, which was set to be introduced by Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) as this issue went to press, would deem a motor carrier to be safe to operate if it is properly licensed, has adequate insurance, and has a better than “unsatisfactory” rating from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), a sub-agency of the Department of Transportation that oversees the safety of the nation’s trucks and buses. Shippers and brokers would have 35 days to determine a carrier’s fitness prior to selection; that time frame was chosen in part because FMCSA updates its ratings and information every 30 days and truck users should have the most current information available, Voltmann said.

TIA ultimately wants to embed the language in the next version of surface transport reauthorization legislation that Congress has now begun to address. The current law expires Sept. 30, and lawmakers will be racing through the spring and summer to have something in place by Aug. 29,

when it is expected the Highway Trust Fund, the mechanism to fund infrastructure projects, will run out of money.

“LIABILITY ROULETTE”

The current carrier selection process is governed by state or
local standards, which Voltmann said is a patchwork quilt
that forces brokers and shippers to play “liability roulette”
with their businesses. “If you are sitting in California or
Minnesota and you are hiring a motor carrier in Ohio to
move a load from Texas to New Jersey, what liability regime
applies?” Voltmann said at the National Shippers Strategic
Transportation Council (NASSTRAC) annual conference
in mid-April in Orlando, Fla. “Well, if you tell me where
the accident is going to occur, I’ll tell you how to qualify
your carrier.”
Such a scenario “is just plain stupid. It’s not interstate
commerce,” Voltmann said.

FMCSA bases its carrier safety ratings on a controversial program known as Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA). Critics of CSA have said that a carrier’s safety scorecard is based on inaccurate and incomplete data, and that trial lawyers have misused CSA’s intent in state court by arguing that shippers and brokers failed to adhere to CSA scores before selecting a carrier that was later involved in an accident.