One UCR Bill Per Customer

Congratulations to the governing board that oversees the Unified Carrier Registration program for casting a vote for fairness and good sense by blocking a plan for states to begin collecting fees before the pricing structure for 2010 is set.

We believe that collecting what would basically be a placeholder fee now — and then going back to carriers for more money when the final fee schedule is set — would have confused fleets and added to the mountain of paperwork that carriers have to contend with already (click here for p. 1 story).

The recent decision by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to allow states to collect interim fees was a bad one. While we understand that most states are hard-pressed for cash to run their myriad programs, turning UCR into a two-step, two-fee program would be unnecessarily burdensome.

Rather, let’s encourage FMCSA to get its permanent fee schedule approved, so that states can bill fleets.

UCR is designed to raise $100 million to fund safety enforcement programs for the 41 states that participate — an important program, to be sure. But FMCSA needs to ensure that it moves forward in a timely basis and with minimum fuss.

As one state official told us, before the UCR board’s vote to ban it, fleets could have expected to get an interim bill in the next few weeks, followed by another bill for the difference between the rate last year and the new rate. And just a little later, carriers would have been hit with a bill for 2011.

As Bill Leonard, director of the motor carrier compliance bureau for the New York State Department of Transportation, said, he could envision “sending three billings to the industry three months apart, and I think that would be very confusing and onerous to the industry  . . .”

As Bob Pitcher, vice president of state laws at American Trucking Associations, put it, had the UCR board not acted, “the program would tend to dissolve into chaos” with multiple billings.

While the UCR board didn’t choose to set any penalties for states that ignore its ban and to move to collect UCR payments anyway, we’re going to have to hope that state officials have the good sense to heed the strong words of the UCR board and the state officials who commented on the move for the ban.