FMCSA Rejects UCR Proposal Raising 2010 Fees

This story appears in the May 25 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said it rejected a proposal to raise Unified Carrier Registration fees for 2010.

An agency official who asked not to be identified said FMCSA was concerned the proposal from the UCR Plan Board of Directors would punish “the good guys,” who were paying the fees voluntarily, rather than attempting to collect fees from companies that were evading them.

As a result, the fee recommendations were “returned to the board for further consideration,” the official said.

“FMCSA has read between the lines of the board’s recommendation and gotten the story straight,” said Bob Pitcher, vice president of state laws for American Trucking Associations, which has opposed the fee increase.

The proposed raises in the UCR fees has been a point of contention between trucking groups and states that use the funds generated by the fees to finance safety enforcement activities.

Avelino Gutierrez, chairman of the UCR board and staff counsel for the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, said FMCSA has asked the board “reformulate our recommendation, based on the issues that they raised in those questions.”

Gutierrez said FMCSA’s concerns generally centered on issues related to the size of the carrier population required to pay UCR fees and states’ efforts to collect those fees.

FMCSA, he said, was “insisting” states take steps to ensure that all the carriers required to pay the fees are correctly identified and billed.

“We will try to answer FMCSA’s questions to the best of our ability,” Gutierrez said.

Citing massive undercollection of the fees, the UCR board proposed large increases for 2010.

Under the proposal, the fees, which had not been raised since they were first enacted in 2007, would be doubled across all categories. The charge for a company with up to one truck would jump to $83 from $39, while the fee for the largest fleets of more than 1,000 trucks would go to nearly $83,000 from $37,500.

Congress created UCR as part of the 2005 highway bill to replace the Single State Registration System. Under SSRS, for-hire carriers were assessed flat, per-vehicle registration fees. The UCR system changed that to include private fleets and companies like freight brokers and freight forwarders.

Pitcher, who also serves as vice chairman of the board, said FMCSA’s rejection “doesn’t necessarily clue one in on which way the agency may be tending.”

It could be interpreted that FMCSA is reluctant to raise the fees quite so high at a time when it is so difficult for industry,” Pitcher said. “It could also, on the other hand, be interpreted that since FMCSA has to take on all of the background information and the justification for the rate setting as its own, they just want to make sure that they know what the board intends.”

Pitcher and Gutierrez said the fees would likely be discussed at the next UCR board meeting in mid-June.

Pitcher said he thought the fees would be approved because there is “a lot of pressure on the board.” However, he added ATA would likely continue to oppose fee increases.

“There may perhaps be a minority report and then that all goes to FMCSA which will look it over again,” he said.

“There is a huge time crunch,” Gutierrez said, because if FMCSA does not accept the board’s recommendation in the next few months, the fees may not be in place at the start of the year.

“The states can’t collect any money until the fees are reset,” Pitcher said, “because Congress has changed how the fees are calculated.”

In revising certain portions of the 2005 highway reauthorization law, Congress said fleets did not need to include trailers in their vehicle counts for purposes of determining the fees.