President Bush recently signed into law the “9/11 Bill,” legislation that includes a provision to re-enact the Single State Registration System (SSRS) retroactive to Jan. 1, 2007. Meanwhile, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is expected to publish the new 2007 Unified Carrier Registration (UCR) Agreement program fees soon.
On Aug. 1, representatives of 38 states, most likely all of the SSRS member states, met by conference call to discuss the situation. The result of the call seems to be a set of conditions that may yet yield an outcome acceptable to all parties.
The states agreed that (1) no state will implement SSRS for 2007 provided FMCSA publishes the 2007 UCR fees by Sept. 1, (2) if FMCSA does not publish the 2007 UCR fees by Sept. 1, the SSRS states will ask the UCR board of directors not to implement UCR for 2007 (and many would implement SSRS instead), and (3) if SSRS is to be implemented for 2007, SSRS requirements would not be enforced before Oct. 15 this year.
