Mexican Cross-Border Program Threatened by U.S. Court Challenge, Low Participation
This story appears in the Dec. 24 & 31 print edition of Transport Topics.
In 2012, the Obama administration’s Mexican cross-border three-year pilot project got into full swing, but a federal court challenge and a lack of widespread interest among Mexican motor carriers continued to threaten the program’s success.
When they began the pilot in October 2011, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration officials said they needed roughly 46 carriers enrolled in the program that would need to receive 4,100 roadside inspections to properly evaluate whether Mexican operators could be as safe as U.S. truckers.
But a year into the program, FMCSA had granted operating authority to only nine Mexican carriers, who have made a total of 193 border crossings.
The program is set to run until October 2014.
FMCSA said the three-year pilot program to date has received 35 applications from Mexico-domiciled motor carriers, 16 of which are under review, pending operating authority. Ten motor carriers have had applications dismissed by the agency or have voluntarily withdrawn their applications.
The participation numbers seem small because about 6,900 Mexican carriers currently operate strictly within the 25-mile border commercial zones and about 1,000 U.S.-owned “certificate” carriers domiciled in Mexico have limited operating authority in the United States, FMCSA said.
The agency is also fighting off another threat, a consolidated federal court challenge filed last year by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the Teamsters union and Public Citizen.
At press time, the parties in the lawsuit were awaiting a ruling in the case, which was argued Dec. 6 before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
OOIDA has alleged that FMCSA officials exceeded their authority by allowing Mexican truck drivers to drive commercial vehicles in the United States without holding a currently valid U.S. medical certificate.
The legal challenge by the Teamsters and Public Citizen centers mostly on the safety and environmental effects of the cross-border pilot.
Federal regulators have said in court documents that they obeyed all U.S. laws and regulations in setting up the program.
The pilot program, authorized in the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which allowed both countries to open their borders to trucks, was a long time in process and has run into a few bumps in the road.
Congress, egged on by the Teamsters union and independent truckers, prematurely shut down an earlier pilot program in 2009.
Within months after Congress acted, the Mexican government initiated a long list of retaliatory tariffs.
It didn’t take long for federal regulators to realize that low participation was going to be a problem. In February, a San Diego newspaper reported that two FMCSA officials traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, to urge carriers there to apply for the program.
“The lack of participation is what’s going to keep us from being able to say, ‘It’s OK to open the border to them,’ ” Anna Amos, director of safety programs at FMCSA, told the U-T San Diego paper, formerly known as the San Diego Union-Tribune.
In May, with only three carriers enrolled, Bill Quade, FMCSA’s associate administrator, told an agency advisory committee that the agency was “extremely concerned about not having sufficient data.”
Quade told the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee that, without sufficient data, “we cannot normalize relations with Mexico and start accepting applications for authority.”
The probable result, Quade added, would be “Mexico putting the tariffs back on United States goods.”
In July, Martin Rojas, vice president of security and operations for American Trucking Associations, told Transport Topics that Mexican carriers have little reason to participate.
“The fact that you have to comply with a large universe of regulations, like engine standards, the inspections and everything else” discourages Mexican carriers, Rojas said.
