The 3 member panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals just blew the last death knell to the OOIDA’s attempts to block the onslaught of the ELD showing up to a truck near you soon.
In their decision, the judges shut out each of the OOIDA’s arguments against the legality of the electronic logging devices.
Here is the ruling, point by point:
1) The rule is contrary to law because it permits ELDs that are not entirely automatic:
The Court of Appeals found that simply placing one statute against one another in the same bill didn’t justify questioning the intent of the Congress.
2) The agency used too narrow a definition of “harassment” that will not sufficiently protect drivers:
The panel found that the FMCSA surveyed a large and diverse enough selection of stakeholders and developed an effective definition.
3) The agency’s cost‐benefit analysis was inadequate and fails to justify implementation of the ELD rule.
The Judges replied that no cost-benefit analysis was needed as this was a Congressional bill. Even if it was required, they deemed that the analysis that was completed would have been sufficient.
4) The agency did not sufficiently consider confidentiality protections for drivers.
Strike 4…Per the ruling, the panel found that the FMCSA did consider all necessary confidentiality protections.
5) The ELD mandate imposes, in effect, an unconstitutional search and/or seizure on truck drivers.
Not so, per the Court of Appeals. Since the “seizure” is part of inspections within a regulatory framework in a “pervasively regulated industry”, there is no 4th Amendment violation whatsoever.
The ELD Aftermath
As many expected, the requirement for almost all large trucks and buses to have either an Automatic On Board Recording Device or an Electronic Logging Device installed and operational by 12/18/2017 remains intact.
Anyone who was previously sitting on the fence or holding out hope that this last ditch effort would stall the compliance mandate must now hop down off of the fence and get to work!
Implementing an effective ELD program isn’t just plug and play. There are some planning steps involved. If you are running more than just a handful of power units, a full scale implementation could easily take 6 months from start to finish.
So, let’s get to work!
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Complete drug and alcohol consortium services (which includes the cost of all random and reasonable suspicion based drug and alcohol tests)
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A full array of customized fleet safety policies and procedures
Claims management assistance
CSA BASIC score monitoring and audit support
Data Q assistance
MCS-150 support
Annual MVR ordering and review
Daily monitoring of changes to CDL status or driving record
Unlimited phone and email access to their personal Fleet Safety Specialist.
and much more!
