Lawmakers Voice Support for Hours Freeze

A letter signed by 177 members of Congress expressed support for a provision to freeze funds to pay for the Department of Transportation’s proposal to overhaul truckers’ hours-of service rules.

The proposal would curb truckers’ daily working time, and has generated considerable opposition within the industry.

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The House letter was penned by Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) and Bob Clement (D-Tenn.), and sent to Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of a House-Senate conference committee for the pending transportation funding bill. Sources familiar with it said the letter was due to be delivered to Wolf’s office this afternoon.

Wolf has stated his objection to the Senate-approved ban on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s effort to finalize the hours-of-service proposal. The ban could be included in the fiscal 2001 transportation appropriations, now being finalized.

Wolf took a step toward completing that bill Thursday by appointing House conferees. As of midday Friday, no meeting between House and Senate representatives had been set.

Those signing the letter included 147 Republicans, 29 Democrats and one independent.

The letter states that “the proposal would result in the need for thousands of additional trucks driven by new and inexperienced drivers.”

Pryce and Clement objected in the letter that the proposal would “shift much of the truck traffic from nighttime to daytime - leading to additional accidents between automobiles and trucks.”

Earlier this week, the White House made its feelings known about the effort to halt the hours-of-service proposal, in a letter it sent to Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The White House letter stopped short of threatening a presidential veto if the ban is part of the transportation funding bill. But it strongly urged Congress not to include the ban in the final transportation appropriations bill.