Ron Gant, Tennessee Association, Steps Down

Ron E. Gant, the voice of Tennessee trucking for the last decade, is leaving the state association to join the staff of Great West Casualty Insurance Co., which writes trucking coverage.

Mr. Gant, who was named president of the Tennessee Trucking Assn. in 1989, announced his resignation Oct. 21. He and his wife, Debby, will move from Nashville to Knoxville, Tenn., where he will merge two in-house Great West agencies into a single retail unit for commercial vehicle and cargo liability. The company also has independent agencies, and earlier this year it opened a regional office in Knoxville.

“While we will not be leaving the trucking industry, we certainly will experience a much different facet of it,” Mr. Gant said in a letter to the TTA board of directors.

His departure from TTA takes effect at the end of November. When Mr. Gant became chief executive of the association, Tennessee’s regulatory environment was quite different than it is today, dominated as it was by the powerful Public Service Commission and its elected commissioners.

Scandal shook the PSC in the early 1990s when complaints led to investigations of allegations that trucking companies that contributed to election campaigns for some commissioners were given favorable treatment by safety inspectors — and that carriers that did not contribute were harassed.

The state Legislature’s reaction was to vote the PSC out of existence.

“Today the PSC is gone, economic regulation was pre-empted in 1995, and that has precipitated great change in Tennessee,” Mr. Gant said in an interview. Now all trucking issues — weight and safety enforcement as well as fuel tax and vehicle registration — are handled by a single agency, the Department of Safety, and that has been a major benefit to trucking, he said.