OMC Stays Put

In passing the $520 billion spending bill that will keep the federal government going until next October, Congress last week left the Office of Motor Carriers sitting where it is, under the Federal Highway Administration’s wing.

President Clinton signed the 4,000-page omnibus legislation without fanfare Oct. 21, only hours after the Senate’s 65-29 vote. The House had given its approval the day before by a 333-95 margin.

Missing from the massive collection of appropriations, special laws, grants and favors is the language Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) originally wrote to shift the government’s chief trucking agency from one bureau to another.

OMC will stay put for the time being, despite Mr. Wolf’s protracted, bruising battle (see accompanying article). But the trucking office will have a different look in the field: FHWA Administrator Kenneth R. Wykle earlier announced his own plan to reorganize regional divisions, replacing nine FHWA and OMC offices around the country with four “resource centers” in Atlanta, Baltimore, suburban Chicago and San Francisco (TT, 10-12-98, p. 1).

The fate of what is a rather small subagency in the panoply of government became one of the major issues in Congress’s attempts to discharge its fiscal responsibilities before members could hit the campaign trail. It took the united will of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), with the prodding of Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), to delete Mr. Wolf’s OMC transfer language from the appropriations conference report, according to James R. Whittinghill, senior vice president of government affairs for American Trucking Associations.

The struggle over OMC almost obscured the other points of interest to trucking in the legislative package:

Highways and Safety

ongress approved almost $48 billion for transportation programs for fiscal 1999, which is already under way. Of that total, $25.5 billion, or 19% more than current funding, will be released from the Highway Trust Fund for work on roads and bridges, according to the bill’s conference report. Another $1.2 billion outside the spending ceiling will be available to the Federal Highway Administration, for a total of $26.7 billion.

Motor carrier safety will get $100 million — an 18% increase — for grants to the states in support of roadside truck and driver inspections.

Ergonomics Study

n response to the many industries that wanted thorough research on ergonomics, Congress earmarked $890,000 for a landmark study to be done by the National Academy of Sciences.

he contract will be awarded by Jan. 1, and is expected to take 18 to 24 months to complete.

AS will study all the available literature related to ergonomics to examine the cause-and-effect relationship between repetitive tasks in the workplace and musculoskeletal disorders.

Never before has such a comprehensive and unbiased study been undertaken, said the National Coalition on Ergonomics.

ATA is a member of the coalition, which has argued that more scientific research should precede any rulemaking on the subject by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The unknowns have made this a controversial subject from the beginning. The study should answer such fundamental questions as how many repetitions of a motion it takes to cause an injury, or why two people can do the same task and only one develops an injury, a coalition spokesman said.

Border Check Delay

fter months of controversy, Congress postponed until April 2001 an immigration law provision that threatened international commerce.

Legislators from border states and business representatives, including trucking, had protested that enforcement of the provision — Section 110 of the 1996 law — would impede trade, travel and other lawful international traffic.

It also would disrupt diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico, they argued.

ection 110 requires the Immigration and Naturalization Service to implement an automated entry and exit control system to document all non-U.S. citizens entering or leaving the northern or southern borders of the U.S.

The 30-month delay will allow time to develop a system for land crossings and seaports. Even then, such systems cannot significantly disrupt trade, tourism or other legitimate cross-border traffic at ports of entry.

Hazmat Registration

egistration fees for hazardous materials transporters may go up, since the bill increases the maximum that the Department of Transportation can raise from these charges.

The new maximum is $11 million, up from $7.37 million in the last fiscal year. The Clinton administration had wanted $14.3 million for fiscal 1999.

The fees, collected by the Research and Special Programs Administration, support local incident response planning and training through emergency preparedness grants to the states.

Registration now costs each hauler $300 a year. RSPA will decide whether to raise the fee for every carrier or change the fee structure in some other way.

STB Funding

eports of the Surface Transportation Board’s impending demise were overstated. It has been “budgeted although not reauthorized,” an official said.

The three-year authorization that accompanied the agency’s creation ended Sept. 30, and congressional displeasure over some of its actions and policies sidetracked a full reauthorization. A one-year authorization passed the Senate Commerce Committee but got no further.

The budget bill provides $16 million for the current fiscal year, although the funding is complicated by a provision reducing the amount by user fees the STB collects, up to $2.6 million.

Senior editor Patricia Cavanaugh and research assistant Ann Seegel contributed to this report.