DOD Rule Fix Gives Movers Flexibility to Store Military Members’ Belongings

Household goods movers have more leeway in putting military service members’ goods into storage if the shipments arrive early, thanks to a federal rule change last month that the industry said will save money and increase available capacity in the moving industry.

The Defense Department’s Defense Personal Property Program dropped its so-called 70% rule last month, said John Bisney, spokesman for the American Moving and Storage Association. The 70% rule required movers that the Defense Department contracts with to wait with service members’ goods in the trucks if the movers arrived early — that is, within less than 70% of the time the military estimated the trip to take, Bisney said.

When a shipment arrives early, it can now be moved into temporary storage, freeing the truck and its driver. Before last month, storage was an option only after the 70% point had passed, and drivers would have to wait for days before unloading the goods.

“They had heard the cries of the industry,” Chuck White, director of government and military relations at the International Association of Movers, told Transport Topics.

“We appreciate the cooperation and understanding of the military about how this rule was hurting both our members and our ability to serve the men and women who serve our country,” Linda Bauer Darr, president of AMSA, said in a statement.

The 70% rule took effect as part of the December 2008 launch of DPPP, which was meant to overhaul the way the military contracts movers to transport service members’ personal goods when they are ordered to relocate, White said. It was designed to minimize the chances that a service member’s goods would be placed into storage.

The Defense Department’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command, which runs DPPP, did not respond to a request for comment.

Using an example of a 10-day window DPPP would schedule for a move, White said a mover might complete the shipment in five days. But the 70% rule dictated that the mover must wait for two days before placing the goods in storage, in order to hit the 70% mark.

Both IAM and AMSA opposed the 70% rule from the outset, arguing it tied up drivers who had to wait with their trucks.

“So you’re sitting in a truck that could probably go on and do other work for DOD members,” White said. “It’s sitting waiting to get to that 70% point before it can offload.” The groups pushed SDDC to repeal the rule.

At the industry’s urging, SDDC suspended the 70% rule in 2011 during the annual summer peak in an attempt to increase available capacity, White said.

“They thought that that would help to add capacity to the mix in the summertime,” White said. “The data that came out of the peak season showed, in fact, that that was exactly what happened.”

SDDC reinstated the rule after the summer peak, and the military’s figures showed that fewer shipments were placed into storage than in previous summers, White said.

At the end of January, it decided to suspend it again, this time for the rest of 2012. The command will evaluate the results at the end of the year, and both AMSA and IAM hope it will decide to permanently repeal the rule.

Bisney estimated that the extra storage time a mover will get, thanks to the rule’s suspension, will total about $50 per shipment.

“The real impact is the driver is no longer sitting around doing nothing for those three days,” Bisney said, using a three-day storage window for an example. Bisney cautioned that it’s hard to quantify the effect of that, but it is significant.

AMSA estimates that 23% of all trips made by household goods movers were for military moves in 2010, or 118,000 shipments. The data are based on AMSA’s members, which represent about 70% of the industry, Bisney said.