After more than nine years of rulemaking and lawsuits, the Obama Administration has agreed to settle the long-standing legal dispute with safety groups and the Teamsters union over the truck driver hours of service (HOS) rules. Under the terms of the agreement, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) will have nine months from the settlement date (October 26, 2009) to forward a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to OMB and 21 months to publish a final rule. The current rules will remain in place while the rulemaking is pending. The settlement reserves the right of the petitioners to go back to court if they don't like the resulting proposal.
In 2003 the HOS rules were revised to permit 11 hours of driving time within a 14-hour period from the time a driver begins work, after the driver has been off-duty for a period of at least 10 consecutive hours. Under the 2003 rules, (which were re-issued in a 2005 rulemaking following the first legal challenge) a driver is limited to 60 hours on duty in a seven consecutive day period. AGC was successful in getting a provision in law, that was included in the 2003/2005 rules, permitting a construction driver to "restart" the weekly "clock" at any time after he or she has been off-duty at least 24 hours consecutively. The hours of service rule has been challenged in court numerous times by safety advocacy groups and the Teamsters Union. In July 2007, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that FMCSA did not follow proper procedural in drafting the rule but did not rule on the substantive merits of the rule itself.
In late 2008, FMCSA issued a final rule retaining the provisions of the 2003/2005 rule, which was again challenged leading to this latest action.
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