Pork Producers Seek Fix for Hours of Service and ELD Rules

Representatives of the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) met recently with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Administrator Raymond Martinez, “urging his agency to come up with equipment and rules related to interstate trucking that meet the unique needs of the livestock industry,” NPPC said in its weekly Capitol Report.

According to NPPC, the Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2015 issued a regulation that all commercial truckers replace their paper driving logs with Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs) by Dec. 18, 2017.

“Livestock haulers got a 90-day waiver, which expires March 18, from the ELD mandate because,” argued NPPC, “it is incompatible with DOT’s Hours of Service (HOS) rules.”

Those regulations limit commercial truckers to 11 hours of driving time and 14 consecutive hours of on-duty time in any 24-hour period. Once drivers reach that limit, NPPC explains they must pull over and wait 10 hours before driving again.

“Truckers hauling livestock within a 150-air-mile radius of the location at which the animals were loaded are exempt from the HOS rules, but the exemption is not uniformly recognized and its implementation varies by state,” NPPC says.

In a hearing last week before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, lawmakers questioned DOT Secretary Elaine Chao about the two regulations and about her agency’s efforts to fix the problem for livestock haulers. The secretary – and Administrator Martinez in his meeting with NPPC and other groups – said DOT is working on a solution.