President Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon signed into law a bill to end a partial government shutdown that had been in place since the end of January that will fund the government through Sept. 30. That funding legislation did more than reopen the government, though.
As reported last week, the funding legislation that passed the U.S. House also included $200 million earmarked specifically for truck parking and codified the President's English language proficiency (ELP) executive order in law. Those provisions remain in the final version of the legislation.
The Department of Transportation is now required to update its regulations to reflect that an out-of-service order is triggered by non-compliance with 49 Code of Federal Regulations 391.11(b)(2), which requires commercial motor vehicle drivers to “read and speak the English language sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.”
[Related: Connor's Law: Truck crash tragedy, ELP advocacy, and a mother's courage]
With respect to the longstanding truck parking availbility problem, the legislation requires any truck parking built with the federal funding to “be within reasonable access to or in the right of way of an Interstate highway, the National Highway System, or the National Highway Freight Network.”
Funding recipients are also barred from charging fees to truck drivers to use parking constructed, expanded, opened, maintained, or improved with grant funding.
[Related: Survey says: Paid truck parking not utilized, resented by many truckers]
Finally, the $200M allocated for truck parking cannot be used to construct or develop “charging or fueling infrastructure for the propulsion of a vehicle, including a commercial motor vehicle.”
A third trucking-related provision in the legislation bans the use of funds by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to require the use of electronic logging devices for trucks transporting livestock or insects -- an exemption that has been in place since the implementation of the ELD rule.
