U.S. Seeks Consensus on Border Before Obama’s Visit to Mexico

This story appears in the April 6 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Department of Transportation will develop a proposal to reopen the United States to trucks from Mexico before President Obama visits President Felipe Calderon there later this month, a spokeswoman told Transport Topics.

DOT officials, including Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, met with representatives of the trucking industry, labor and advocacy groups in Washington last week in an effort to craft an acceptable replacement for the now-shuttered pilot program started during the Bush administration.

“Our goal is to make sure that we deliver a solid set of principles for legislation to the president before his scheduled trip” to Mexico, said Candice Tolliver, a spokeswoman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Obama is scheduled to travel to Mexico April 16. Last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton discussed the future of cross-border trucking with Calderon during her own visit (3-30, p. 1).

Ricardo Alday, a spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, told TT, “The Mexican government looks forward to working with the United States so it can fulfill its international trade obligations.”

The April 1 meeting between DOT and interest groups was part of the department’s effort to draft the principles for reopening the border, Tolliver said.

“They are clearly reaching out to stakeholders and members ofCongress in hopes of getting the program developed and sold and under way,” American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves told TT.

ATA was one of a half dozen groups that sent representatives to meet with LaHood. Others at the meeting included representatives of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the Teamsters union, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Graves told TT he informed LaHood that ATA “has been and continues to be supportive of seeing the border open to commercial vehicles.”

He said ATA mentioned that in order to win over critics, a new program could include “a more robust and transparent” system for tracking the vehicles and driver history of Mexican carriers. In addition, ATA suggested a “more robust tracking system” for Mexican trucks crossing the border, which would allay concerns that the foreign carriers might haul freight between U.S. cities.

CVSA Executive Director Stephen Campbell also attended the meeting and said he thought Obama may “propose something that is sweeping and far-ranging, so that at least the administration has done the right thing. . . . But it’s that bad guys in Congress won’t let them.”

That proposal, Campbell speculated, may be a fuller opening of the border than had been allowed under the pilot program killed by Congress.

“They’re prevented, clearly, from any kind of pilot program,” he said. “So, if you can’t do a pilot program, and yet you’re going to do something, what else are you going to do?”

Congress ordered that test shut down in March, causing Mexico to impose nearly $2.4 billion in tariffs on U.S. goods ranging from sunglasses and Christmas trees to cell phones and frozen potatoes (3-23, p. 1).

ATA Senior Vice President Tim Lynch said that while DOT may be able to open the border without congressional approval, it would be unwise “politically . . . if they tried to run it without their approval.”

“Since Congress cut off any funding for any type of program, Congress is going to have to approve any type of plan they come up with, and I would be just totally amazed if that could possibly happen in the foreseeable future,” said OOIDA President Jim Johnston. He added that that LaHood told them he had “been instructed by the administration to get a proposal for going forward with some sort of a test program on Mexican trucks.”

Jim Berard, spokesman for Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and a vocal critic of the DOT pilot and cross-border trucking, said LaHood had met with the chairman separately.

“It wasn’t a negotiation, it wasn’t a meeting to resolve anything right then and there,” Berard said, adding that Oberstar still had a number of concerns with trucks from Mexico.

“The bottom line is safety,” Berard said. “Mexico does not have the same safety regime that the United States has . . . and until we can make certain that trucks coming out of Mexico can be operated safely on U.S. roads . . . Oberstar will oppose an opening of the border to free travel.”

The North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1994, was to allow for full cross-border trucking between the United States and its neighbors, Mexico and Canada, but President Clinton blocked Mexican trucks from coming across the border in 1995.

President Bush attempted to lift that ban in 2001 after a NAFTA arbitration board ruled it was illegal under the trade pact, but the Department of Transportation was unable to get past legal and legislative hurdles to opening the border until 2007, when it launched a pilot test of cross-border trucking.