State Registration Fee Plan Would Double Fleet Charges

This story appears in the Feb. 23 print edition of Transport Topics.

State truck registration fees would more than double under a proposal being prepared for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration under a two-year-old system Congress set up to reduce fees for for-hire carriers.

The large increase was recommended by the board overseeing the Unified Carrier Registration Agreement, established in late 2007 to replace the Single-State Registration System.

Registration fees for truck fleets were intended to go down, because they were supposed to be spread across a much larger base that includes private fleets, freight forwarders and brokers.

Because of states’ collection difficulties, however, the UCRA board on Feb. 12 recommended that FMCSA change the fee structure for 2010 to account for lower-than-expected revenue and change the law that created the system.

The fee for a 1,000-truck fleet would jump to almost $83,000, from about $37,000.

Bill Leonard, director of the New York State Department of Transportation’s motor-carrier compliance bureau, said states “need the new fee structure” because they have had “trouble” collecting fees from the vastly expanded number of companies covered by the registration requirement.

State agencies rely on the revenue from UCRA fees to fund their enforcement activities.

Bob Pitcher, vice president for state laws for American Trucking Associations and vice chairman of the UCRA board, told Transport Topics that the new structure unfairly punishes carriers who have been complying with the registration requirements.

“We think that in the case of . . .  most of the states, the effort in enforcement has been lacking,” he said, “and without a decent effort at enforcement, it certainly sends the wrong signal to carriers and brokers who have not been paying the feels and it simply encourages them to continue evading the fees.”

Pitcher said that it was “well-established” that states were not collecting as much in fees as they had anticipated, but that they should be forced to do more to collect existing fees, rather than raising fees on truck fleets.

Pitcher said ATA and other groups would oppose the new fee structure and were considering returning to Congress over the issue.

Leonard said the number of firms the new system requires his state to collect fees from is 10 times greater than the number under the old system.

“Under SSRS,” Leonard said, “we had 3,000 of our own [fleets], and because we were a home state for carriers in neighboring states and provinces, we had another 2,000.

“For 20 years we had a handle on those,” Leonard said, but then in looking at the new database, “New York had 25,000 carriers with another 25,000 from neighboring states and provinces.”

Culling that list has been difficult, said Leonard, who also sits on the UCRA board, and has resulted in the fees being set at a level that doesn’t match the reality of the number of carriers in operation. When fleets go out of business, he said, they often stay in the system, so states waste time trying to collect fees from defunct companies.

Rick Schweitzer, general counsel for the National Private Truck Council and a UCRA board member, said industry groups opposed the proposed fee in-crease because it “penalizes carriers who voluntarily pay” when states could be doing more enforcement to collect the existing fees.

“Every state could do more. What’s really at issue is how much states should be required to do,” Leonard said.

“There are some that believe states should only get the entitlement if they register 100% of the carriers in the database, and to me that’s unrealistic,” referring to the collected fees the program returns to states.

Leonard said the goal of UCR was to set an “appropriate fee” that would raise the same amount of revenue that SSRS did, roughly $110 million.

Another reason for the fee change, Pitcher said, was to comply with a 2008 federal law that exempted trailers from the registration levy.

To adjust for that, the fee for a fleet, freight forwarder or broker operating two or fewer trucks or trailers was $39, while an entity of more than 1,000 trucks and trailers paid $37,500.

Under the proposed fee hike, an entity with one or fewer truck would pay $83 in 2010, and an entity of more than 1,000 power units would pay $82,983.

SSRS had collected a $10 fee per truck in a for-hire carrier’s fleet, but the new UCRA collects its fees on a per-company basis from private carriers, brokers and forwarders, in addition to for-hire fleets.

Leonard said that since fleets often “back out” equipment not being used for interstate business, and are no longer required to register trailers, the new structure bumps fleets into lower brackets, thus holding down their fees.

“For example,” he said, “the top line is probably going to go from about 800 carriers to about 250 or 300.”

Pitcher said that on a per-vehicle basis, just adjusting for the change relative to trailers “would have caused the fees to go up 50% per vehicle; as it stands the proposal is for them to go up 115% or 120%.”