Nadler reintroduces dray truck bill

Nadler reintroduces dray truck bill    Congressman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., has reintroduced a bill that would amend the Federal Motor Carrier Act to allow ports to enact and enforce clean truck programs and implement environmental regulations that are more stringent than federal requirements.
   Nadler’s offices said his Clean Ports Act of 2011, which had 50 cosponsors, “would confirm that port cities like Los Angeles, New York, Newark, Oakland and Seattle possess the legal authority to set the standards needed to replace diesel trucks with clean diesel and alternative energy vehicles in order to reduce pollution.”

Nadler

   It said the change would have a “negligible effect on consumer prices, lowers public health costs for taxpayers, and does not unfairly burden the workers who haul cargo to and from U.S. seaports.”
   The clean trucks program in Los Angeles is being challenged by the American Trucking Associations in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. ATA said in a court brief filed in December that a concession program contains a ban on independent owner-operators that would reduce the number of licensed motor carriers performing drayage services, “potentially reduce the supply of truckers by 40 percent, increase driver wages, and add $500 million to $1.1 billion to the annual costs of the drayage industry — thereby increasing drayage prices high enough to potentially divert 3 percent of container traffic to other ports.”
   Nadler said his bill “represents a crucial modernization of federal law that would dramatically improve the quality of air for the estimated 87 millions Americans who live and work near major container ports. It is indefensible that ports are being challenged from enforcing clean truck programs to replace highly polluting and outmoded diesel trucks.    Such pollution profoundly increases rates of asthma, cancer and heart disease, and contributes to a growing public health crisis across the nation.”