After Chasing Criminals in Arizona, Dick Landis Came East to Tame Newly Deregulated Industry

By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter

This story appears in the April 6 print edition of Transport Topics.

PHOENIX — As an Arizona highway patrol officer for 14 years in the 1970s and ’80s, Dick Landis chased illegal immigrants, drunken college students, speeding motorists and even hardened drug dealers up and down just about every strip of concrete slicing through the state’s scalding, lonely desert.

Then he went to Washington to shape up the deregulated trucking industry, and things got tough.

Landis never set out to become a high-ranking federal bureaucrat working in one of those drab, gray office buildings in the nation’s capital. He didn’t relish the thought of appearing before congressional committees or fending off special interest lobbyists. It just sort of happened — and the results included the first federal commercial driver license standards and abushel of other important trucking safety regulations, marking Landis as a man who made a significant and lasting contribution to the motor carrier industry.

“If I don’t do anything else professionally, I’ll go with a smile saying I made a difference with the CDL,” Landis said during a recent interview here, where he now lives and works.

“Dick really got the federal CDL off the ground,” James Burnley, U.S. transportation secretary from 1987-1989, told Transport Topics in an interview last month. “It was a somewhat radical idea at the time, but it changed in a fundamental way how we license truck drivers, and set minimum standards in a way that was new and different.”

For most of his life, Landis, currently chief executive officer of the nonprofit group that created the PrePass “weigh-in-motion” technology, has had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.

In the mid-1980s, it happened when a call came from Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole inviting him to become the nation’s top trucking safety enforcement official — the associate administrator of the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Motor Carriers, a predecessor to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

“It wasn’t something that I went searching for,” said Landis, who at the time headed trucking enforcement for the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

“I guess it was like a lot of things in my life. Opportunities present themselves; you come to the fork in the road and take it,” he recently recalled.

But the kid who grew up in Yakima, Wash., the son of a fire chief, had come a long way. In his youth, Landis tried college, but didn’t like it. Lacking any direction, he joined the Navy and worked as a radio communications technician on a destroyer.

When he got out of the Navy, Landis found himself living in Long Beach, Calif., with no idea what he wanted to do.

It was at this point that his talent for stumbling upon opportunities seems to have begun. He engaged a resume service and was on his way home with 100 copies when he spotted a help wanted sign at a Lockheed facility. Feeling underdressed for an interview, Landis walked in just to drop off a resume.

“They said, ‘Let’s talk’,” he re-called. “I walked out of there two hours later and I had a job working on the Cheyenne attack helicopter program and 99 worthless resumes.”

He eventually followed the Cheyenne program to Yuma, Ariz. There, Landis’ roommate got recruited by the highway patrol and talked him into signing up for training to be a reserve officer.

“The next thing I know I’m hired by the highway patrol,” Landis said.

He was 25 at the time. For the next 14 years he served as an Arizona trooper stationed in Nogales, Yuma, Wenden and Phoenix, rising to the level of commander.

In 1985, he moved into a friend’s basement apartment in Washington, and accepted the federal challenge offered by Secretary Dole.

And a challenge it definitely was at a time when the trucking industry still was operating in a sort of “Wild West” post-deregulation environment, according to Lana Batts, who in those days was senior vice president of government affairs for American Trucking Associations.

“If you could walk and chew gum at the same time, you could get authority to become a truck driver,” Batts, now a partner at Transport Capital Partners, told TT. “In fact, they actually gave [operating] authority to a guy who was sitting in Sing Sing [Prison] on a murder conviction.”

That would all change under Landis’ watch. During his nearly eight years of federal public service, he was credited for developing and implementing federal CDL standards, and literally overseeing the writing of a chest-high stack of new and streamlined federal trucking safety regulations.

On his arrival in D.C., he inherited responsibility to implement not only federal CDL standards, but also the Motor Carrier Safety Act of 1984, which required his agency to revise the entire body of U.S. motor carrier safety regulations, ranging from uniform equipment standards to driver fitness standards.

The tasks were an arm-twisting, sweet-talking, time-consuming process. In 1985, states had their individual standards for a truck driver to obtain a CDL, and it wasn’t unusual for a driver with questionable skills to hold licenses issued by more than a dozen different states, Batts said.

David Hugel, FMCSA deputy administrator from 2006 until earlier this year, said that prior to the establishment of federal testing requirements, some states did not require any special testing for a CDL. A potential trucker could take a driving and written test for a passenger vehicle and, for an extra fee, be issued a CDL.

“There was no question that Congress was somewhat outraged that there were lax standards,” said Hugel, who worked on the CDL development issue during his tenure from 1987-1995 as head of government affairs for the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

Even if a truck driver was on the verge of losing his CDL for moving violations, he could move to another state and get another CDL with his bad driving record going undetected, Hugel added.

In a series of recent interviews with TT, Landis said the notion of forcing a federal mandate on 50 different state jurisdictions and the District of Columbia was a “very ominous project.”

“How do you get 50 states that are diverse both philosophically in some cases and technologically in other cases on the same page in a short time?” Landis recalled. “It really came down to setting it up as a team effort.”

“It took a lot of work between the motor vehicle agencies, the state agencies and a number of federal agencies,” Landis said. “I kept hearing from the states that it couldn’t be done. Whenever I told Congress it couldn’t be done, they told me to get it done.”

In particular, he remembered that every time things went wrong, or whenever he ran into roadblocks, Landis would get a request by Sen. John Danforth, the Missouri Republican who served from 1976-1995, to appear before his Commerce Committee to answer questions.

“Danforth would just keep saying, ‘Everybody says you’ve got to do this, so why don’t you? Figure out a way.’ ”

The process of adopting the CDL standards was done in a piecemeal fashion, and involved countless meetings to reach a consensus on model state legislation.

Both Burnley and Hugel said it helped that Landis had prior experience as a state enforcement official and already was closely involved with state and national safety groups.

”He was somebody that a lot of the key players in the states knew,” Burnley said. “And they knew that he understood their concerns.”

By the time he left his post in January 1993, the law had been fully implemented: It had become illegal to hold more than one license, and states were required to adopt unified federal testing and licensing standards for truck and bus drivers.

“He was the right guy at the right time” to accomplish this task, Batts said.

While Landis’ move to Washington was unexpected, it didn’t come without experience. His last highway patrol assignment, again by chance, came after Arizona voters in 1981 approved a referendum to deregulate trucking.

After the referendum passed, the job of enforcing truck and bus safety was transferred from the Arizona Corp. Commission to the Department of Public Safety.

At the time, Landis was a “free-floating” captain who was based in Phoenix.

”I got a phone call one day and they said, ‘Landis, you’ve got trucks today,’ ” he said. “It was like basically starting over.”

But it was that truck enforcement experience with the Arizona Department of Public Safety that helped qualify him for the Washington federal regulatory post, serving under the administrations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

“He’s one of the few that transcended two presidential administrations,” said Stephen Campbell, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a group that creates and oversees truck inspection standards for law enforcement, government and industry. “That’s a testament to the fact that he’s always the consummate professional.”

David Berry, a vice president for truckload carrier Swift Transportation, characterized Landis as a “man of high integrity and character.”

Berry said Landis makes people feel comfortable enough to speak their minds, because “people trust him,” and as a regulator he had a reputation for being “tough, but fair.”

Karen Rasmussen, president of the Arizona Trucking Association, has known Landis since 1978. The two first met at a dinner in Oklahoma City when tornado sirens went off.

“Over the years, the story has gotten greatly embellished to where now we were under the table during dinner,” Rasmussen said.

On a more serious note, she said, “He’s got a great universal perspective on transportation and technology and has some pretty good insights on the trucking industry.”

Campbell, a former ATA vice president for safety and Louisiana highway patrol sergeant, said Landis always had a knack for playing well with others.

“He’s a gregarious guy, a little outside the stern cop mentality,” Campbell said. “Dick’s always been great at getting along with people and that’s part of the reason he’s been so successful.”

Campbell said that Landis always has been a good listener, willing to take in divergent points of view, especially those of the trucking industry.

He said he’s convinced if Landis was a top federal regulator today, political hot-potato industry issues such as hours of service and Mexican trucks would have been more quickly and successfully resolved.

“Dick was very much concerned that we ensure the safety of commercial vehicles on the nation’s highways, but that we don’t shut down interstate commerce in the process,” Campbell said.

One of those individuals who Landis listens to is his wife, Diane, whom he met stationed with the highway patrol in Nogales in the early 1970s.

Diane Landis said she knew instantly that they had a future together. “After I first met him, I told everybody I knew that I was going to marry that guy,” she said.

They were married in 1972. Landis said he and his wife had no children by choice, giving them the flexibility to pick up and move to follow opportunities in their careers.

Diane is somewhat of a political junkie. She was a White House personnel liaison for the Veterans Administration and worked for the George H.W. Bush and Sen. John McCain Republican presidential campaigns.

Despite their prior roles in the nation’s capital, Landis said it was unlikely a return to Washington was in their future.

“Between my wife and I, we did the town pretty well,” Landis said. “You knew it was time to go back to Phoenix when going to the house in Annapolis felt better than going to White House receptions.”

Editors’ note: This profile is the second in an occasional series on noteworthy and influential people in trucking and freight transportation — from either industry or government. Featured are leaders who have developed standing over the course of a career or who now hold a significant decision-making position.