The notice of final disposition was posted in the Federal Register on Friday.
The applicants were Power and Construction Contractors Association; Western Equipment Dealers Association; Association of Energy Service Companies; Cudd Energy Services Inc.; SikhsPAC and North American Punjabi Trucker Association; Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Inc.; American Disposal Service; Towing and Recovery Association of America; National Electrical Contractors Association; and the Agricultural Retailers Association.
The FMCSA initially denied nine of the applications for exemption on June 16. The agency denied the Agricultural Retailers Association’s application on July 26.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) requested a five-year exemption from the ELD rule for certain motor carriers considered to be a small transportation trucking business. If granted, the exemption would have covered small trucking businesses that did not have a carrier safety rating of unsatisfactory and that could document a proven history of safety performance with no attributable at-fault crashes, according to the Federal Register.
FMCSA reviewed the application and approximately 4,090 comments submitted. An estimated 96 percent of the comments were from owner-operators in favor of the exemption, the Federal Register said.
“FMCSA noted that most of the content of the application challenges the basis of the ELD rule itself, rather than justifying an exemption for a specific segment of drivers under applicable statutory standards,” Friday’s announcement said. “FMCSA noted further that the application provided no consideration of the significant difficulty that would be encountered in trying to identify and validate drivers who meet the proposed exemption criteria, especially during roadside inspections.”
The FMCSA said the information provided by SikhsPAC and North American Punjabi Trucker Association “failed to distinguish the drivers who would be included under the exemption. The applicants failed to indicate how they could ensure that the exemption would achieve a level of safety equivalent to, or greater than, the level of safety that would be obtained by compliance with the HOS regulation,” according to the Federal Register.
After reviewing the applications for exemption and submitted public comments, the FMCSA denied the other applications “because the agency could not ensure that the exemption would provide the requisite level of safety.”
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