The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's acting chief Robin Hutcheson was on something of a whirlwind tour of outreach to various trucking constituencies during her time at the Mid-America Trucking Show this past week in Louisville, Kentucky. Thursday afternoon, she sat for a round of questions for a half hour with members of the trucking media.
Among reiterations of Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's recent commentary around the importance of -- and efforts to emphasize ways to combat -- the paramount truck parking issue, Hutcheson revealed plans around establishment of the Truck Leasing Task Force required by the big infrastructure bill passed last year. A call for participation is expected close on the heels of the recent similar request issued to potential members of the Women of Trucking Advisory Board.
"Just a few weeks ago the Secretary [Buttigieg] signed the charter for groups that can now be convened," Hutcheson said. She noted the Women of Trucking Advisory Board, after the open call for participants, will undergo a review "sometime after April 8. ... Sooner rather than later we hope to have it up and running."
The leasing task force, set to examine reports of predatory practices among some leasing companies, according to FMCSA, will also "examine common truck leasing arrangements, including the impact of inequitable leasing agreements on the industry, and resources to assist CMV drivers in assessing the financial impacts of leasing agreement."
The press release announcing the open call for potential members was figuratively sitting "on my desk," Hutcheson said, also noting a timeline for actual implementation of the under-21 interstate driver pilot program already under way. ""We’re not going to launch the program until we have a very solid data collection methodology. We won’t start this program until late summer, at the earliest."
[Related: Inside the FMCSA's under-21 interstate driver pilot program]
Hutcheson's current post leading the agency in the absence of a more permanent head -- she is the fourth "Acting Administrator" since Ray Martinez left the Administrator post in 2018 -- comes on the heels of a 25-year transportation career spent mostly in public service, including time as the director of public works in Salt Lake City, Utah, and a similar post in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That final post had what she called the "most analogues to what we do at FMCSA. ... in any one week I might be presenting to city council on public policy and riding along on a bridge inspection … or standing and testifying at the state legislature." Her work there was about "operations in the field and taking policy and making it work in the field."
