Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/683064
NEWS & NOTES 28 // OWNER OPERATOR // JUNE 2016 What it all boils down to, DeLullo says, is as increasing employment of "gotcha-type methods of enforcement," an attitute of "me against you. I say in any great relationship, it can't be a 'me against you' proposition. As it is, this is the DOT and the federal government against me in this business. I'm 50 years old, and I don't see why I want to continue to do this." The central point of the problem, as De- Lullo sees it, is that the increasingly adver- sarial relationship, the gotcha attitudes and methods he's seeing, is producing the data that is then being used at the highest levels of the CSA ranking/scoring program to produce the scores that carriers are being judged on. His thoughts on it all are a defi nite variation on the old "garbage in, garbage out" phrase to describe systems doomed by the component parts on which they are based. (That phrase is one we've all heard before when it comes to the CSA program, of course, going back to its early days.) "Once you get that," he says, once "you know what that means on the road" during in- spections, it's easy to see it all as a "downward spiral." Despite a high percentile in the Crash Indi- cator BASIC of the CSA Safety Measurement System, "our company's in great shape, but this system is a broken system," he adds. While Congress has taken action on the CSA Safety Measurement System and its cat- egorical percentiles, pulling them from public view pending a review/revamp of the pro- gram, FMCSA nonetheless continues to move forward with its long-planned Safety Fitness Determination safety rating system that would lean heavily on roadside inspection/violation data to make the ratings. As reiterated in re- porting by James Jaillet just today, there is a push by an ad hoc coalition, including asso- ciations representing small carriers around the nation, to halt the SFD rulemaking process by arguing the release of the rulemaking proposal violated Congressional intent in the FAST Act highway bill. As I've written before, the coali- tion argues the proposal should have been held until the CSA SMS was reviewed/revamped, as required by law, given how much the SFD relies on the CSA SMS' architecture. If you judge the industry by looking at the CSA SMS, De- Lullo says, "the safest carrier on the road is the new carrier, the guy with no history. I've been doing this for 30 years and I look worse at a a glance than a brand-new carrier." In the fi nal analysis, he says, "In order to conquer things you have to have a two-way working relationship," he says, one that's just not there at this point between the indus- try and law enforcement. "The end result — when you go to the store 10 years down the road, everything's going to cost more." OO Bob DeLullo started in trucking as a driver in 1986, he says. Since then, he believes, most aspects of the business of truck- ing have improved — from equipment to pay and image, how- ever slightly in some cases. "But regulation is going haywire. … The regs side of this business is the single biggest issue we have."