I'm AD's Vice President of Government Affairs, and welcome to today's webinar on the Hours of Service Rules, What Equipment Dealers Need to Know. Our speaker today is Rick Schweitzer. Rick is an attorney in Washington, D.C., although he told me he's no longer fully in Washington, D.C., but with decades of experience in handling regulatory, legislative, and litigation matters for transportation companies and their trade associations. The practice includes a broad base of administrative, tax, corporate, and international issues involving the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal and state governments. Before we turn it over to Rick, I'd like to remind everyone or let everyone know that those of you who are with us live can submit questions during the webinar via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. I know some of you submitted questions in advance, which we will certainly get to either during Rick's presentation or at the end. The webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch on demand at your convenience. And many of you, AED has been very involved with reforming the Hours of Service Rules for a number of years. Several years ago, the administration issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, which AED submitted comments, and many AED members participated in crafting those comments. We retained Rick's services to actually draft those comments. We submitted similar comments to the notice of proposed rulemaking that came out. And then the final rule will take effect here in just a couple of days. But overall, I think it's going to be a great benefit to AED members and should provide a great deal of regulatory relief for those on the webinar. So with that, I'll let Rick take it from here and tell us exactly what that regulatory relief looks like and answer any questions that you might have. So Rick, go ahead. Thanks Daniel. And good afternoon, everyone. I'm Rick Schweitzer. As Daniel said, I'm a transportation lawyer. My practice is based in Washington, D.C., although I no longer am. I'm actually in Louisville, Kentucky right now where I grew up. And I understand some of your businesses are located here as well. But I have worked with AED and with a number of trade associations and transportation companies on motor carrier safety regulations for many, many years. And I've helped draft comments for AED and for other organizations on both the advance notice of proposed rulemaking and the proposed rule on driver hours of service. So I want to walk you through the new driver hours of service rule because it goes into effect next Tuesday. And there are some very beneficial provisions in the rule. This is a very good rule for industry. Your membership didn't get everything that you asked for, but you got a lot. And this should provide you some additional operating flexibility and some regulatory relief. So with that, let's begin. This rule was published by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation. We often refer to FMCSA or DOT, and it's essentially the same entity. It was published June 1st in the Federal Register. And as I said, it goes into effect September 29th. There's not going to be any delay to this implementation date. There have been a number of efforts that I'll go into in just a minute to try to delay or even withdraw this final rule. But it is going to go into effect on September 29th as scheduled. It provides a great deal of additional flexibility for drivers and their employers, and it makes revisions to the hours of service rules in four areas. And we'll walk through each of those four areas in the next few minutes. The important thing for your concern, however, is to the extent that you're required to have electronic logging devices in your vehicles, you need to have them reprogrammed. You should have done this already, obviously, because it requires you to deal with your ELD vendor. You also need to make sure that your drivers are retrained and they understand what the new rules are, and that your dispatchers understand what the new rules are. So everyone who's involved in managing or scheduling drivers needs to be conversant with these new hours of service rules. Obviously, the federal and state and local governments are doing the same thing because enforcement officials need to understand what the new rules are as well. And that's one of the reasons why it was published in the June 1st Federal Register, but it didn't go into effect for several additional months. All right. I mentioned that there were some attempts to delay or defeat the rule. And as I said, so far these have all been ineffective. The rule is scheduled to go into effect on September 29th as planned. But back in June, the Teamsters Union and several safety groups, the Alliance for Highway and Auto Safety and Parents Against Tired Truckers and CRASH and several others, they petitioned the FMCSA for reconsideration of the final rule. They wanted the agency to conduct a comprehensive study on the effects of the rule and any waivers of driver hours of service and their effects on driver fatigue. And to my knowledge, the agency hasn't responded to their petition, so it has not been granted. It's sort of in limbo at this point. Now these same groups, the Teamsters and these safety groups, have actually filed a petition for review in federal court. They've gone to the Federal Court of Appeals in D.C. and they claim that the new rule changes are going to exacerbate driver fatigue. And they've asked the court to invalidate the final rule. But again, they've done nothing that is going to keep this rule from going into effect next week. In federal court, you have to have a stay issued if you want to have a rulemaking stopped while the case is pending on the merits. They haven't asked for a stay. The court obviously has not granted a stay. So while this case is proceeding, the rule is going to go into effect. And I think it's unlikely that the Court of Appeals will strike down the final rule on the merits once they get to it, which probably is going to be six to 12 months from now. There's a briefing schedule and then they would likely have an oral argument before a panel of three judges. I mean, it's possible that you get a year down the road and the Court of Appeals strikes this rule down, but I don't think it's likely. In addition, the House of Representatives, the Democratic leadership, passed a highway bill back in July, July 1st. And one of the provisions in the highway bill was that the FMCSA conduct this same kind of comprehensive review of the impacts of the current hours of service rules, including waivers and exemptions, and then report back to Congress on the effect of their review. And in the meantime, the rule, it would not go into effect until 60 days after the FMCSA reported back to Congress. Well, this was in the House bill, but it's not in the Senate bill that's currently under consideration. It's not going to become law. So we don't have to worry about that. And I mentioned that I don't think that the Court of Appeals is going to strike down the rule on the merits. And that's because all of these arguments about driver fatigue were made by these parties, the Teamsters and the safety groups, to the FMCSA during the rulemaking process. Again, they had two bites of the apple. They had an advance notice of proposed rulemaking and they had the actual proposed rule. And in each case, they had an opportunity to file comments. And they filed these fatigue-related comments with the FMCSA and the comments were considered, but they were rejected by the agency. So again, I think that that September 29th date is a hard date and these new rules will go into effect. All right. What are the rules? Well, I mentioned there are four different areas where the rules have been changed. The first is in the 30-minute break rule. Right now, your driver has to take a break of at least 30 consecutive minutes after eight hours on duty. Well, this new rule changes that. It's no longer eight hours on duty. It will be eight hours of driving time rather than eight hours on duty. So if your driver drives for four hours, say, and then takes a 15-minute break and then drives another four hours, that's eight cumulative hours of driving time. And at that point, after that second period of four hours of driving, that driver must stop and take a break of at least 30 consecutive minutes. It can be longer than that, obviously, but it has to be at least 30 minutes. Now, the other major change in the break rule is fairly significant as well. The break may be satisfied by using on-duty, not driving status rather than off-duty status. Under the old rule, what's still in effect until next Tuesday, when you take a break, you have to log off-duty. This new rule says, when you take a break, you can log on-duty, not driving. Or if you have a sleeper berth, you can log into your sleeper berth as well. But you don't have to log off-duty. You may log off-duty, that's fine. But if you log on-duty, not driving, the driver can then do other compensated work for the employer, things like dealing with customers or working for your technicians, doing the kind of repair work that they are actually hired to do. Or they can do paperwork or some other type of productive work rather than just logging off-duty. As long as they're not driving, they are complying with the 30-minute break rule. The other thing to keep in mind is that the 30 minutes has to be consecutive. You can't accumulate 30 minutes of break time using multiple shorter break periods. So you couldn't drive for two hours, take a 10-minute break, drive for four more hours, take another 10-minute break, and then drive two more hours and take a third 10-minute break and say, well, I have 30 minutes off. No. So it has to be 30 consecutive minutes or more after eight cumulative hours of driving time. But again, you can log that break time as on-duty, not driving, and still be productive. And that, I think, will be one of the most beneficial provisions of this new rule for your type of operations where your drivers are not driving a significant amount of time each day. Most of their time is in other non-driving productive activities. So this should be helpful for your operations. All right, the second change is in the adverse driving conditions provision of the hours of service rules. Right now, if a driver encounters adverse driving conditions, the driver has an additional two hours of driving time. So you're limited to 11 hours of driving time in a 14-hour duty window, typically. Under the adverse driving conditions rule, you get 13 hours of driving time in that 14-hour window under the old provision. Under this new provision that goes into effect next week, you get an additional two hours in your maximum duty window. So you'd get 13 hours of driving within 16 hours on duty. So you're not stuck with trying to comply with or deal with the adverse driving conditions and taking additional time behind the wheel, but not having any additional duty period. It also changes the definition of adverse driving conditions somewhat. And I've got the old definition or the current definition and the new definition up on the screen. The current definition has to do with snow, sleet, adverse weather conditions, a highway covered with snow or ice, or unusual traffic conditions, none of which were apparent on the basis of information known to the person dispatching the run at the time it was begun. So look at that. It has to be the dispatcher didn't know about these adverse driving conditions at the time that the run was begun. Now the new definition changes this in a couple of meaningful ways. First of all, it uses the same snow, ice, sleet, and adverse weather conditions or unusual road or traffic conditions, but it says that were not known or could not reasonably be known to either the driver immediately prior to beginning the duty day or immediately before beginning driving after a qualifying rest break. So if your driver takes this 30 minute break and then starts driving again, if the driver could not reasonably know that there were adverse driving conditions, then you can take advantage of this. Or secondly, by the motor carrier immediately prior to dispatching the driver. So this does two things. It adds the phrase or could not reasonably be known. So that if you're just not paying attention, if you didn't check the weather, for instance, or didn't check Waze or some other traffic device or app, then you probably can't use the adverse driving condition there. And it also says that the driver or the motor carrier would have to not be able to reasonably know about these adverse driving conditions. So if your driver, for instance, is 50 miles away from the site of dispatch and takes a break and then starts another run, the driver immediately prior to beginning that driving period after a qualifying rest break still is held to the standard of should that driver reasonably have known about the adverse driving conditions before setting out on that second leg. So it's something to keep in mind. You should be mindful of this new definition, but the bottom line is you get 13 hours of driving time within a 16 hour duty window under the adverse driving conditions exception. The other thing to keep in mind is that if you do use this, and it is helpful, particularly in winter weather, but also if there is an accident or some other type of unforeseen congestion, you should annotate your ELD entry or your driver logs to indicate that you use the adverse driving conditions exception. So for instance, if you're preparing a paper log for that day or you have an ELD for that day, otherwise, if you just use this exception, it's going to show your driver exceeding the 11 hour driving limit and probably exceeding the 14 hours on duty limit as well. So you need some sort of written notation, a footnote, an annotation to indicate where the driver made the determination and the fact that the driver did use the adverse driving conditions exception to the daily hours of service limitations. All right. The short haul exception is the third change to the hours of service rules. And in addition to the changes in the 30 minute break requirement, the short haul exception is probably going to be the most useful change for your industry. The short haul exception has been in the rules for a long time. It's already there right now, but what the FMCSA did was expand it. This changes the short haul exception by lengthening the maximum on duty period from 12 hours to 14 hours. And it extends the distance limit within which a driver may operate from a hundred air miles to 150 air miles, which actually comes out to 172.6 statute miles or nautical miles. The driver must stay within that 150 air mile radius of the work reporting location and must return to the work reporting location and be relieved from duty there within 14 hours. If you do that, then you're exempt from three very important requirements for that day. You're exempt from the driver log requirement, which is your paper record of duty status. You're exempt from electronic logging devices, which means your truck doesn't even need an ELD on it. And you're exempt from the 30 minute break requirement. So everything I told you about 30 minute, the break rule two slides ago, wouldn't apply. As I said, right now you do have this same short haul exception in the hours of service rule. CDL drivers have to stay within a hundred air miles and non CDL drivers have to stay within 150 air miles, but everybody had only 12 hours in which to get back to the normal work reporting location and to be relieved from duty. Now everybody's on the same rule, whether you're a CDL driver or a non CDL driver, it's 14 hours and it's 150 air miles. CDL and non CDL commercial drivers are under the same exception. Now a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, this doesn't exempt you from the hours of service driving or on duty limits. You still have the requirement that you can only drive 11 hours and you still have the 14 hour daily on duty limit after which you may not drive. So you still have to keep records of the driver's daily and weekly duty time. Now I know some of you probably use the extended 16 hour on duty period, which you can use twice a week, which allows a driver who gets behind or is otherwise delayed during the day to extend the daily duty period up to 16 hours, two times in any seven day period. Well you can't use that 16 hour day in conjunction with the short haul exception. The reason is, is that for the short haul exception to be effective, you have to go back to your work reporting location and be relieved from duty within 14 hours. So if you go beyond the 14 hour limit, then you aren't subject to the short haul exception. You have to come up with a driver law or an ELD and you have to comply with the 30 minute break requirement for that day. Now well, I'll just leave it at that and go on to the next one. I remembered what I was going to say, sorry. AED in their comments on the proposed rulemaking asked the FMCSA to allow drivers to stay within the short haul exception and not go back to the original work reporting location, but to go back to another work reporting location. Maybe it's your house, maybe it's a hotel, maybe it's another job site and end your day there. But as long as it was within the 150 air mile radius, still allow you to stay within the short haul exception. That's one thing you didn't get in this final rule. The FMCSA considered that and said, that's going to make it more difficult to track this and therefore we're not going to put that burden on enforcement officials and we're going to continue the requirement that we have now that you have to go back to your original work reporting location and be relieved from duty there within 14 hours in order to benefit from the short haul exception. But again, I think this is still going to be a big benefit for your member companies. All right, what happens if the driver exceeds 14 hours or 150 air miles? Well, it's not the end of the world obviously, but if the driver goes beyond the 150 air mile radius or if you're not relieved at your at work reporting location within 14 hours, then the driver must complete a paper record of duty status for that day. You still may not drive after 14 hours on duty. Now let's go back to this last part down here at the bottom where it says you can't use the extended 16 hour day in conjunction with the short haul exception. You can still use the 16 hour day. So the driver, if the driver hasn't exceeded 11 hours of driving time, which yours probably would not, you can extend the day twice a week to up to 16 hours. You just don't get the benefit of the short haul exception. So what do you do for that day? Well, you have to complete a paper record of duty status. It's just a log book, just like you have done for many, many years for that day. And a driver can do this up to eight times in any 30 day period, meaning you can either go beyond the 14 hours on duty or the 150 air mile radius up to eight times in any 30 day period and complete a paper record of duty status. As long as you stay within eight times in a rolling 30 day period, you're good. And you have to keep those paper logs for six months, just like you do normally. If you go to the ninth day and you exceed either the hours or the 150 air mile limit in any 30 day period, then for that day, you need an ELD in your vehicle. You cannot do this on the ninth day in any rolling 30 day period without an ELD. And any additional days beyond that until the driver is back in compliance with the eight days in 30 rule on that. So again, as long as you complete a paper record of duty status for that day, you can go beyond 150 air miles. You can go beyond 14 hours, as long as you don't drive more than 11 hours. But you can only do that eight times within a rolling 30 day period without being subject to the ELD requirement. All right. The final change to the hours of service rule probably won't affect many of you because it amends the sleeper berth exception. If you have trucks that have sleeper berths, it allows you to split the required 10 hours off duty time into two periods. Right now you're required to have at least eight hours in the sleeper berth and two additional hours off duty. This gives you some additional flexibility. You can do seven hours in the sleeper berth and three hours off duty, otherwise with neither period counting against the driver's 14 hour driving window. So those are the changes in the hours of service rule. And again, they go into effect at 1201 a.m. on September 29th. Now, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's hours of service rules apply to drivers in interstate commerce. States have their own hours of service rules, and they have to have the same rules that apply to interstate drivers as the federal rules. But for drivers operating in intrastate commerce, states adopt the federal rules in order to be eligible for federal funding under what's called MCSAP, or the Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program. And the FMCSA gives hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the states to enforce motor carrier safety regulations. Most of the enforcement officials that your drivers deal with at the roadside are state officials. Those roadside inspections are funded through the Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program. So the states have to adopt these new hours of service rules to the extent that they apply to intrastate drivers. Now, some states adopt the changes to the federal rules automatically. So come Tuesday in those states, for intrastate drivers, the federal rules are going to apply intrastate as well. Some states require an administrative rule change to change the state regulations. They'll have to get their state department of transportation or public safety or whatever to go through a rulemaking. And other states actually require legislative changes. So they'll have to get their state legislature to enact a new law to adopt these federal motor carrier safety changes. Generally, states have up to three years to adopt changes to the federal motor carrier safety rules before they are in jeopardy of losing their funding. It's rare that a state might actually lose funding, but the FMCSA does make sure that the states have uniform standards. And for most of your operations, particularly in the east where you're going across state lines on a regular basis, this is not much of an issue because the federal rules are going to apply to you. In some larger states, it might be an issue. California is one state where it might be an issue. The California Highway Patrol has indicated that it's not going to adopt changes to the federal hours of service rules for three years. Why? Because they don't like the 14-hour rule and the short-haul exception. As I said, under the 14-hour rule, you can drive for up to 11 hours. Your guys typically don't drive that long, but anybody who's subject to the short-haul exception can drive up to 11 hours in a 14-hour window. But the problem is you don't have an ELD on board, you're not creating a record of duty status for that day, and you're not subject to the 30-minute break requirement. And in the comments to the proposed rule, the Highway Patrol said they warned that an expansion of the short-haul exception to 14 hours would make impossible discovery of 11-hour violations by enforcement personnel, foster noncompliance, and would not be prudent in large states. Well, they've sort of got a point. It is more difficult to figure out if somebody is driving more than 11 hours if they're subject to the short-haul exception, because they can drive 11 hours within a 14-hour window and not have to have an ELD or a driver log. So it's going to be difficult for enforcement personnel at the roadside to determine whether or not that driver is in violation of the daily driving limits. Now one of the questions that we got issued before the presentation today was, are there any reporting requirements for the short-haul exception? Does the driver need to carry anything on the truck, for instance, to show that he or she is abiding by the short-haul exception? And the answer is no. There never has been. There's not any coming up with the new rules as well. The FMCSA has made this very clear. If you're using the short-haul exception, you don't need anything in your vehicle to prove it. If you're subject to a roadside inspection, you simply tell the inspector, I'm a short-haul driver. I don't have an ELD on my vehicle. And the enforcement inspector, if he or she is smart, might ask you when you started that day and how long you'd been driving to make sure that you didn't violate the 11-hour driving limit, or that you weren't already in violation of the 14-hour limit. But as California Highway Patrol pointed out, it's going to be hard for them to prove it. At the roadside, since you're not required to have anything that shows that you're in compliance with the short-haul exception. Nevertheless, this is a valid regulatory provision, and you are absolutely allowed to take full advantage of this. And come Tuesday, you're allowed to take advantage of the expanded version of this. And one other provision that hasn't changed, but I thought I would throw in here, and I'm not sure that it affects many of you, but it might, is the 24-hour restart of the weekly on-duty time. If you have a driver who is used primarily in the transportation of construction, material and equipment, then that driver who is subject to the 60 hours in seven consecutive days or 70 hours in eight consecutive days, may restart that week with an off-duty period of 24 or more consecutive hours. So you've got a tractor trailer, a flatbed that hauls construction equipment or construction material, again, that driver is subject to the weekly on-duty periods, and after 60 hours in seven days or 70 hours in eight days, if you operate seven days a week, you can restart your weekly on-duty time with 24 hours off-duty. Now what's transportation of construction material and equipment? I've reprinted the definition here from 395.2. It's the transportation of construction and pavement materials, construction equipment, maintenance vehicles by a driver to an active construction site, which is a construction site between mobilization site and materials, for final completion of the construction project, and you have to stay within a 75 air mile radius of the normal work reporting location. It also allows states to establish a different radius that has to be somewhere between 50 and 75 air miles. Again, I think most of your drivers are service technicians that wouldn't take advantage of this, but to the extent that you use company drivers or even your third-party logistics drivers who are transporting construction material and equipment to a job site, they can take advantage of this weekly on-duty reset. This has not changed in the new hours of service rule, but it still is available to you. All right. Everything that I've talked about so far is either in effect now or going into effect on Tuesday. What I'm going to talk about now is a proposal from the FMCSA that would give you an additional amount of flexibility to split your duty period. The FMCSA just in the recent weeks has proposed a pilot program that would allow drivers to take a break, one break of at least 30 minutes and no more than three hours that would split the 14-hour daily duty window. Now, back before 2003, if you were around then in this industry, you know that you used to have a 15-hour daily duty window, but if a driver logged off duty in the middle of the day, that stopped the clock, and then the driver could log back on duty, and then you completed your 15-hour daily duty window in which you can then drive up to 10 hours. This proposal is like that. It would allow the driver to take one break during the day of between 30 minutes and three hours and split that 14-hour daily duty window. This approach was actually in the hours of service proposed rule. The FMCSA considered this, and they took comments on it, but they decided not to include it in the final rule. And the reason they didn't include it was because they don't have enough data on how this might affect driver fatigue and whether or not the flexibility that could be achieved by carriers and shippers and receivers and drivers would optimize productivity without jeopardizing safety. The standard that they have is that it has to ensure safety performance at a level equivalent to or greater than what would be available without regulatory relief. And they're looking at a pilot program that would have 200 to 400 commercial motor vehicle drivers over a period of up to three years, and they want to track them to get that kind of data to see whether this will allow an equivalent level of safety. Now the agency in promoting this said that allowing drivers to split the duty period might allow them to avoid congestion and reduce the incentive to speed in order to complete runs within the 14-hour duty window. Right now, at least the American Trucking Associations says that many of their long-haul truckers' biggest complaint about the hours of service rules is the 14-hour duty window, and that you often get stuck at a shipper's dock or a receiver's dock or a customer's site or at a repair facility or stuck in traffic, and you're up at the end of the day against that 14-hour duty window. You might not have driven 11 hours, but you're up against the 14-hour duty window. Now this would allow you to take up to three hours off duty to deal with whatever congestion or delay you run into during the day. You would have to log the time off duty, but you would then have the remainder of your 14-hour duty window in which to complete your run. This is just a pilot program proposal. They're taking comments on this, I think, up to November 2nd, and then they're going to decide whether or not to conduct this pilot program. But my guess is the agency will go ahead with the pilot program, and they'll come up with this pool of drivers, and they'll track them and track their accident history and determine whether or not they can add this to the hours of service rule several years down the road and give you some additional flexibility. One last thing I wanted to mention. Everything I've talked about up to this point is on the hours of service rule, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention COVID-19 response by the FMCSA. I just wanted to mention that last week, I think it was last Friday, the FMCSA extended the waiver for the validity of CDLs and commercial learner's permits that expired on or after March 1st through December 31st of 2020. Now this doesn't include non-CDL drivers. This is only CDL drivers. But if you have a CDL driver who had a CDL or a learner's permit that expired on or after March 1st, then the FMCSA has granted a waiver, and that driver's CDL is presumed valid through the end of this year now. The driver doesn't have to do anything, states don't have to do anything, but by the end of this year, the driver will have to go to the state driver licensing agency, obviously, to renew the CDL. But for right now, the drivers are good through December 31st. For medical certificates, there is an extension as well, but it's in two parts. If you have medical certificates that expired between March 1st and June 1st, then they're automatically valid through October 31st of this year. But for medical certificates that expired after June 1st, they're automatically valid through December 31st of this year. The reason for the difference is that the FMCSA said that they were concerned about drivers having expired medical certificates for such a long period of time. If you had a driver whose medical card expired March 1st or 2nd, they didn't want that driver to have essentially 10 months of an expired medical card. Those drivers whose medical certificates expired up through June 1st get until the end of October. Everybody else after June 1st has medical certificates that are automatically valid through December 31st of this year. The reason for all of these extensions is that the FMCSA understands that state driver licensing agencies and medical examiners are just backed up. They don't have the capacity they had before. For those of you who've tried to make appointments either with your motor vehicle administration or a medical examiner, you know that it may take several months to get an appointment to get in to see the relevant individual. They have extended the waiver through the end of the year. That is what I have as prepared remarks. I'd be happy to take questions and answers on the hours of service rules or anything else that has to do with DOT regulations. I deal with this stuff all the time, so if you've got questions, let's get them out. Well, thanks, Rick. We do have a couple of questions out there. We did want to answer one question that came up a couple times, and that is that, yes, the presentation will be sent to you after the event, so be on the lookout for that. I know many of you are interested in reviewing this afterwards. Starting off here, can a company use the ELD to record the eight days in the 30-day rule to go beyond the 150-mile radius? Yes, absolutely. You're required to at least have a paper law, but you could certainly use an ELD to do that. All right. Once again, please do, at the bottom of the screen here, there's a Q&A tab. Please do submit your questions. We have, I guess, free or AD paid-for legal advice here for the next few minutes. There you go. If you have any follow-up questions in the next few weeks, feel free to call or email me. That's part of the deal here. I'm happy to answer your questions. Appreciate that. Another question here, is the California Highway Patrol declining to adopt all the HOS changes or solely the short-haul exemption? I haven't seen anything in writing. This is just by phone and another lawyer that I know and respect, she confirmed with them over the phone that they were not adopting the changes. My understanding is that it is all of them, so that the current California intrastate rules would remain in effect. Again, I haven't seen that in writing. If you're in California, you might want to contact them yourself to see what rules are going to apply. All right. I have a question here, actually. You didn't address it. I might be putting you on the spot here, but it involves not really hours of service rules, but it involves the drug and alcohol clearinghouse. Could you discuss that a little bit and what the requirements are there? Clearinghouse? Yeah. The clearinghouse went into effect in January of this year. It's again, a very good rule. It requires some additional activity by motor carriers and by drivers, but the intent of this clearinghouse is to give you an online forum in which to get comprehensive information about drug and alcohol testing violations by CDL drivers who are potential hires for your company or who are actually working for your company. It requires you to do a couple of things. Before you take on a new CDL driver, you have to do a pre-employment query of the clearinghouse. What that means is you go into the clearinghouse and do a full query and see if there's any information about that driver indicating that the driver has ever failed a drug and alcohol test, DOT test, or has refused to take a drug and alcohol test or has any other kind of DOT violation involving drug and alcohol testing. And then if you get a hit, meaning that that driver does have information in the clearinghouse, then you do the follow-up query, which gives you the actual information about that driver and will tell you what the violation was and whether or not the driver completed the return to duty status. If the driver completed the return to duty program, then the driver is eligible to drive for you. If the driver has a violation but never completed the return to duty process, then you can't use that driver. The second part of this is that every year, you have to do a query of the database for all your existing drivers to determine whether or not there's any information in the clearinghouse database on them. Well, if they're your existing drivers, wouldn't you know that whether or not they had a drug and alcohol test violation? Well, maybe or maybe not. They might be actually operating for somebody else, and that other employer would have a violation that got into the database. In any event, there are a number of possibilities where a violation might fall through the cracks. The FMCSA requires you not only to do the pre-employment query, but to do this annual query of all of your existing drivers. You have until January 6th of 2021 to do the query on all the drivers that you have right now. You have to do it every calendar year. This rule went into effect January 6th of 2020. You've got until January 6th of 2021 to do your annual query for all of your drivers. This is a good rule because eventually we're going to get enough information on this database to where a driver can't fail a drug test or an alcohol test, and then go down the road and get a job with another motor carrier. The information is going to be uploaded by the employers. That's another requirement on you. If you have a driver that has a positive test or refusal, you and your medical review officers are required to upload that information into the clearinghouse. That becomes part of the database for that driver. Great. Thank you. A question did come in. Again, please enter your questions here in the next minute or so. Other than California, are there any other known states who will not automatically recognize the HOS changes Tuesday? I guess you said some states have to do it maybe legislatively or administratively. Is there a resource? Does everyone just have to call their state and find out, or is there some kind of- For most of you, you're operating in interstate commerce, whether you know it or not. You're subject to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Rules because it's not just a matter of going across state lines. Are you actually dealing with products or services that cross state lines? There's a long, complicated process of trying to determine whether the federal rules or the state rules apply. If I were you, unless there is some indication from your state highway patrol or Department of Public Safety or DOT that they are not going to enforce the federal rules, I would just go ahead and comply with the federal rules and assume that the state is going to adopt them going forward. All right. Another question here. Is the rule 80 hours in eight days for short haul? The weekly on-duty period is 70 hours in eight days if you operate seven days a week. Beyond that 70-hour on-duty cumulative amount, you may not drive a commercial motor vehicle. If you don't operate seven days a week, it's 60 hours within a seven-day period. If you've accumulated 60 or 70 hours in that weekly on-duty time, then you may not drive a CMV beyond that until you've had a sufficient amount of time to bring you back into compliance with the weekly on-duty period. All right. I'll just give it a minute for any other questions here. If not, we'll go ahead and let everyone go about their day. Rick did say that he'd be available for questions on his cell phone, his office number, and his email address are all listed on this screen here. Feel free to reach out if you do have any other questions over the next couple of weeks as the rule is implemented. I don't see any other questions coming in, so I won't keep us all today. Rick, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you everyone on the presentation for participating as well. Again, the presentation will be sent out to you so you can look over. Once again, please do use Rick as a resource over the next couple of weeks if any questions do pop up. Of course, use AAD as a resource if you need to going forward as well. Especially if you have any questions or issues or comments about the rules or as you're seeing them implemented, please let us know. I think that'll be helpful, particularly as we work with Congress and others moving forward over the next couple of years to continue to make these rules better and more efficient for our members. With that, Rick, do you have anything last word here or are you good? No, I'm good. Thanks. It's been a pleasure. Again, if you have questions or comments, please contact me. Great. Thank you all. Everyone have a great rest of the week and we'll talk soon. Thanks.

webinar

Rick Schweitzer

Hours of Service

HOS rules

flexibility

drivers

employers

safety performance