Illinois has increased penalties for speeding in highway construction zones and will allow police to use cameras to enforce work zone speed limits. Drivers who speed in a work zone will be fined $250. They also will pay an additional $125 for the Transportation Safety Highway Hire-back fund, used to hire off-duty state troopers to monitor construction or maintenance zones. Repeat violators will be fined $750 and an extra $250 for the hire-back fund and could face license suspension.
Environmental Protection Agency has fined a Massachusetts company $109,120 for violating the state’s anti-idling regulations. EPA charges that between August 2003 and March 2004, Material Installations Inc.’s delivery trucks idled engines on-site for nearly 1,000 minutes.
UPS must make contributions to pension and health care funds for Teamsters with respect to overtime pay under the funds’ participant agreement terms regardless of any unwritten understanding that might exist between the parties, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled. The appeals court agreed with UPS that the funds could not enforce rules and regulations that contradict written provisions of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA), but it said that no written term of the CBA conflicted with the participant agreements at times relevant to the case. (New York State Teamsters Conference Pension & Retirement Fund et. al. vs. UPS; Docket Nos. 03-7349, 04-1366)
Q We dispatched a truck to Illinois that does not go there ordinarily. We received a $3,000 overweight ticket for a 73,000-pound load. I discovered that we got the ticket because we had not registered the truck in Illinois through IRP. The fine seems steep. Is this right?
A I have received several questions recently concerning fines in various states for not base plating a truck to run in those states. Many of the formulas for fine assessment seem excessive based upon the nature of the offense. Drawing a fine for unregistered equipment is one more pothole in the road for the unwary.
During a carrier’s first year of operations, it estimates mileage in each state and at little additional cost can obtain a portion tag to run throughout the scope of its authority on possible operations. In later years, the carrier typically base plates a truck based on the actual mileage run in states for the previous year and is less likely to include random states outside its ordinary scope of operation. But it is all too easy to send a local truck on a long-haul move without remembering that the base plate did not include a pro rate for the states it will be traversing.
Because each state seems to enforce its own system of fines for this offense – and there is no federal preemption – you are left with pleading for mercy before the judge and asking for a fine abatement based upon good cause shown.
