'They Have No Clue What They're Talking About': Mike Collins Hammers Proposed Trucking Regulations

2 months ago

During a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing prior to the Congressional recess, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) questioned witnesses about permitting costs, and proposed trucking safety regulations.

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Transcript

00:00The poorhouse was paved with good intentions. A lot of folks have good intentions, but they have

00:05no clue about what they're talking about. I think we find that a lot on this side.

00:10I want to make another comment, too. In talking with a lot of people,

00:15excuse me, about choke, a lot of people in the construction business,

00:19it seems that a lot of your percentage of your costs that you have to put in there

00:23is due to permits and the waiting on permits, and the fact that I think that good torque reform in

00:30this country would probably decrease a lot of those permit costs and speed up your projects

00:36overall. So I'd like for you, you know, if you have a comment, I'd love to hear it, but otherwise,

00:41I think that's something that would be of great value, not just to your industry, but

00:46probably to all industries. But what I want to get to is Mr. Pugh.

00:51Mr. Pugh, my Baptist in me wanted to stand up and cheer. Congratulations, 2.5 million miles, safe driving.

01:00People don't realize that's 20 years on the average driver. That only not says

01:07a lot about you, but I think it says a lot about where our industry has gone

01:12with the availability, the technology out there, and the focus on being safe. I know in my

01:18company, we want to be the most technologically advanced, the safest with the best employees, period,

01:24and we have a handful of a million milers out there. I want to focus real quick because

01:30there's some things that I've heard up here that I want you to make a quick comment on. Number one,

01:35we heard a 76 percent increase in accidents of 75 miles or over in speed. I don't have a truck

01:43out there that runs 75 miles an hour, and if you actually looked at the data, AAA's even done this.

01:50They didn't want to admit it, but over 75 percent of the accidents out there are not

01:55the truck's fault. It's the four-wheeler, it's the car, the automobile's fault.

02:00With 98 percent of trucking companies out there, 10 trucks or less, 95 percent of them are five

02:05trucks or less, a huge portion are owner-operators and independent drivers. What would this increase

02:12that one of the colleagues on the other side of the aisle is pushing for liability insurance, what

02:16would it do to the trucking industry? It would, in short, put them out of business. A lot of the

02:22small guys, my members, we don't even know like how this would be charged. We don't know how insurance

02:28will withstand this because there's really nothing out there to measure. There's already been lots of

02:33liability insurance companies leave the market. We know as people leave the market and there's less

02:39competition, prices go up, so this could be disastrous to small business, to supply chains, to

02:45carriers, even the size of yours. I think it'll be disastrous for the trucking industry, but it's

02:50nothing but a pay raise for trial lawyers. That's all it is. 100 percent. Let's move on. Rear impact guards.

02:59I would venture to say if we had a question in here, people don't even know what that is.

03:05What's a rear impact guard? It's the DOT bumper for lack of better terms. When you see a semi-truck

03:12going down the road on the back of the trailer, kind of a T-pattern thing or something like that,

03:16it's the rear bumper. So we have those, right? Yes, we do. Is a rear impact guard to

03:23to prevent the truck from injuring the car or from the car hitting the truck and being injured?

03:29To keep the car from entering completely and underneath the truck. So I think that

03:34that puts a little more evidence to the fact that the automobiles out there

03:39cause the problem and a lot of times we see that the trucking industry takes the hit.

03:43Trucking industry almost always takes the hit when you're correct. Over 80 percent accidents

03:48are caused by the car. So automatic emergency brakes. Man, I got a boatload of them I'd love to get rid of.

03:56Are they fail-proof? No, they're not. They're not foolproof. We have constant false

04:02going on all the time. Go off when you go under a bridge or road construction sign, anything that may.

04:10I drove a truck back from Reno last year back to Kansas City. It was constantly going off for just

04:15there's nothing around. I'm in the middle of Wyoming and places. Yeah, we got federal bureaucracy

04:19out there, bureaucrats, federal agencies, people that sit around here that think they know better,

04:24have no clue. Guarantee you probably the majority of folks in this room don't have a CDL driver's license.

04:29They don't know that industry. But since we're out there on the roadway in the motoring public,

04:34we're an easy target because people see us. I mean, you're scratching your head on what you think you

04:38might can get done this year. You ride down the road, oh there's a big truck. Let's see what we

04:42can do to that as well. I'm out of time but I wanted to add one more thing. Broker fraud.

04:48It is huge. It's been going on for decades but I would like to add in there that we have another

04:54fraud going on out there too and that's the towing industry. The towing industry has been ripping off

04:59the trucking industry for decades. I know for a fact I just saw one, a truck that had an accident

05:04by itself ran off the interstate. The towing bill was $78,000. I had a member who received a tow bill

05:14a couple weeks ago in the state of Pennsylvania. They were charged $9,000 heat and humidity

05:20charge with a 10% administration fee on top of that. It was well over a $60,000 tow bill.

05:26Most regulated, taxed, burdened industry in the world.

'They Have No Clue What They're Talking About': Mike Collins Hammers Proposed Trucking Regulations

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