DOT: No changes to road rules
08/10/2011 @ 10:29am
Business Editor
If you haul grain as part of a crop share agreement with your landlord, you're not going to have to get a commercial driver's license (CDL).
That's what the Department of Transportation says in an official guidance issued today, hoping to calm members of Congress and farm groups who feared a new set of burdensome regulations.
Instead, the Department is not changing any federal rules that apply to requirements for CDLs for farmers.
"These common sense provisions we have now will continue to be available," Deputy Secretary John Porcari, told Agriculture.com. "We are definitely saying crop sharing does not trigger a commercial drivers license."
But that issue instigated the recent furor over CDLs in the farm community. Farmers worried that some states were about to interpret crop sharing as a commercial arrangement that would trigger a CDL. So the Department's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration sought comments in the Federal Register on three issues:
•what distinguishes intra- and interstate commerce for operation of a commercial motor vehicle in a state;
•the issue of whether a farmer transporting supplies or crops under a crop sharing agreement needs a CDL;
•and whether farm equipment should be considered commercial vehicles.
Porcari said the Department's goal is to make sure states don't make any changes that go against common sense in those three areas. The rules aren't changing , he said.
He said there may have been confusion over the Department's asking for advice through a public notice on May 31 in the Federal Register. Normally, if a federal agency wants to change regulations, it publishes a proposed rule in the Register, so some people may have thought a new rule was coming.
If the Department wanted advice, its strategy worked. It got about 1,700 responses from the National Association of Wheat Growers, National Farmers Union and others. And earlier this month a bipartisan group of 22 senators sent the Department a letter. All opposed any changes.
Senator Chuck Grassley, one of the signers of the letter, told reporters Tuesday that new rules from the Department "are going to add very unnecessary regulations to farming but not improve transportation safety."
Porcari said the department doesn't want to do anything to burden the agricultural sector of the economy. "We see this as a jobs issue."