By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter This story appears in the Feb. 21 print edition of Transport Topics.
Lawyers for American Trucking Associations and the Port of Los Angeles completed filing their written legal arguments last week over the port’s attempted ban on independent owner-operators.
According to a schedule set by Peter Shaw, an appellate commissioner with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, now that all the briefs have been filed, the case will be set for oral arguments in California “as soon as possible.”
In its brief, ATA asked the appeals court to reverse the decision of U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder, who ruled in September that the port had the right to ban independent operators because it acted as a business, or “market participant,” and not as a regulator in adopting its diesel emissions-reduction plan.
In October, Snyder temporarily blocked implementation of her ruling until ATA’s appeal is resolved. She agreed with ATA that motor carriers needed lead time to alter their business plans after the appeals court’s decision.
“Federal law precludes state and local governments from revoking a federally licensed carrier’s right to provide trucking services,” ATA said in its Feb. 15 brief. “The port impermissibly usurps that federal power by interposing additional conditions and exercising discretion over which licensed motor carriers can provide drayage services.”
ATA said that port lawyers have built their case on two “fallacious notions”: First, that an “expansive, free-standing market participant doctrine overshadows the federal preemption statute” and second, that the port acts like a business when it “promulgates regulations that dictate which licensed motor carriers may contract with third-party cargo owners to dray containers to and from the port.”
ATA also said that “funding incentives for environmental improvements is a quintessential government function, not the act of a business.”
However, the port argued in its final brief that it was entitled to an exemption from a federal law that allows only the federal government to issue regulations that affect motor carriers’ “rates, routes or services.”
“Much of ATA’s argument ignores the fundamental point that the Port of Los Angeles is an enormous commercial enterprise, not a regulatory agency,” port lawyers argued. “Hence, ATA’s contention that the District Court’s reasoning would improperly extend application of the market participant doctrine to purely regulatory agencies has no merit.”
