What you may not know about the EOBR bill

Since I reported on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s attempts to gain new regulatory authority over interstate drivers relative to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program’s now-internal Driver Safety Measurement System last summer, new wrinkles have emerged in Senate bill S.1950. This bill caused an uproar over the fact that it would, among other things, mandate electronic onboard recorders for hours of service compliance for virtually all interstate carriers.

But, as they say, the lead may well have been buried — language in the bill, says Drew Anderson, director of sales for the CSA data mining services firm Vigillo, would in effect give the Department of Transportation expanded authority to disqualify a driver from operating in interstate commerce. In essence, this is the Senate’s attempt to make reality what so many drivers feared about the CSA program when information about it was initially rolled out to the public: that the DOT was about to get into the business of rating drivers and, based on those ratings, revoking CDLs.

“Under the present statutes,” says J.J. Keller’s Tom Bray, “the only time a driver can be disqualified by the FMCSA is if the driver is found to be an ‘imminent hazard’ under 383.52 or the driver disregards a Notice of Claim,” a levied fine for a violation.

The section of concern in S.1950 is 310, which deals with the definition of “disqualification” of a driver in the federal code.

Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who introduced the bill, “want FMCSA to ramp up the DSMS side of CSA,” says Anderson. “If that legislation passes as is, the federal government will have the ability to put the driver out of service, off the road, and suspend their license.”

The chances of that legislation passing, judging by a similar bill introduced in the last Congressional sessions, as Tom Bray points out, might be slim. No action has been taken on it since its early-December introduction.

Should it pass, “any of this would require rulemaking that has not even been proposed yet,” as Bray notes. “The FMCSA would need to pass rules to implement the provisions of the statute that would allow them to directly disqualify a driver. Driver SMS scores in the CSA program would tie into this as one possible reason the FMCSA would look to disqualify a driver in the future, but the FMCSA would have to get it into their regulations first.”