Graves Scolds Washington for Stalling Highway Bill

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

PHOENIX — American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves lashed out at Washington for failing to make progress on a surface transportation bill, saying “political expediency” prevented essential action on improving the transportation infrastructure.

In his annual State of the Industry address Oct. 18 at ATA’s annual Management Conference & Exhibition here, Graves also predicted a resurgence for trucking.

Attacking inaction on highway legislation, Graves said, “Just last Monday, President Obama . . . in support of his call to spend $50 billion, said: ‘There’s no reason why we can’t do this . . . all we need is the political will’.”

“Well Mr. President, I couldn’t disagree more. There’s a reason why you can’t do it, and it’s called political expediency,” Graves said.

The political will Obama spoke of, Graves said, “is stuck in a bottleneck — an old-fashioned political bottleneck that is the result of both political parties pandering shamelessly to voters.”

That pandering, he said, involves trying to sell voters on the idea that the nations’ transportation problems “can be solved by ‘thinking outside the box,’ or by using ‘creative financing.’ ”

“That’s really their way of saying that making a tough vote to raise taxes in support of infrastructure investment is less important than their own re-elections,” Graves said.

“You can’t build world-class infrastructure without money,” Graves said, adding that roads “aren’t free, and they’re not cheap.”

However, Graves warned against using various types of so-called creative financing to raise that revenue, saying, “Anyone who claims privatization, securitization or monetization is the solution to the problem ought to be subject to incarceration.”

Those methods, he said, involve tolling, which is a less-efficient manner of collecting revenue than the fuel tax. Graves, the former Republican governor of Kansas, pointed a finger at his party, saying, “Tolling is not the conservative solution for building roads and bridges.”

He used the infrastructure issue to declare that the political process is broken, and the system designed by the founders “has been relegated to secondary status, supplanted by political cleverness as the principle endeavor of the Congress and the president.”

The political woes that have stalled the highway bill are just one of the challenges Graves said have stung the industry.

“In the past two years, we’ve experienced the worst recession in most of our lifetimes. Political gridlock has slowed our nation’s democratic process to a snail’s pace . . . and the proposed activist policy and regulatory agenda in Washington is rocking the entire business community back on their heels,” Graves said.

Those challenges all have combined, he said, to position the industry “for our very own ‘Phoenix’ kind of moment, but the timing of that rise back to profitability, back to robust freight volumes, back to the need for new trucks and trailers and back to having headaches over where to find drivers . . . keeps eluding us.”

“But rest assured,” Graves said, “once our rise from the ashes is under way, we will have something positive to look forward to.”

However, that recovery, Graves warned, could be set against “game-changing times” for the industry.

“The industry,” he said, “will re-emerge during some of the most significant changing times confronting trucking since the deregulation days of the early 1980s.”

Graves said that those changes include “CSA 2010, hours of service, electronic logging, fuel efficiency standards . . . a transitional time of shifting to alternative power and fuel for our trucks, continued assault on the independent contractor model, pressures to change the manner in which drivers are paid, and how we’ll adapt to our nation’s growing need for freight capacity.”

With an eye on those changes, Graves said, it is imperative that industry leaders look at trends and try to stay ahead of them.

“The ban on owner-operators at the Port of Los Angeles is one such trend and is one we will continue to aggressively fight,” he said. “It is critically important that local units of government not be allowed to dictate the flow of commerce on a whim.”

Another trend Graves said the industry should be mindful of is the push toward using natural gas as a power source for large trucks.

Citing a commitment from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bringing up legislation providing incentives for natural gas trucks — as well as the lobbying efforts of billionaire T. Boone Pickens — Graves said, “Whether you’re ready to embrace it or not, we need to pay attention.”

Graves closed by saying that the state of the industry “is best described like beauty: Right now, it’s truly in the eyes of the beholder.”

Fleets, he said, are seeing challenges and opportunities in different ratios, and the state of the industry “will only get better if we continue to work together, be willing to lead — not just accept these challenging times — and continue to have faith in the essentiality of this great industry.”