Glitches Abound at CARB Websites

Greetings to all!

I hope you have been able to get yourselves reported for 2014 in CARB’s TRUCRS system. It has not been easy and there have been many glitches in their on-line reporting system. 

Two of our members when reporting were somehow kicked out of the over 26,000 GVR weight category and that caused a huge problem not easily solved. A one truck owner-operator I helped report was in the Low Mileage Construction Truck (LMCT) and a reporting glitch threw him out of that category. I know that it was a CARB error as I was the one that did the reporting for them both and I have reported at least 100 truckers over the last two years, so I can do it in my sleep.

Another big problem that has surfaced is that many people that reported their trucks as the LMCT, and are now finding out that they indeed do not have till the end of 2015 with those trucks if they have more than one truck. This has come as a huge shock to some and rightly so.

We are all interested in seeing what kind of beneficial changes CARB will be providing our industry, as promised, by next month. For now, unfortunately, the only thing to do is comply with the regulations and hope for more extensions, bigger low mileage groups and delays for the attainment areas of the state.

Alameda Co. Dump Fee Mystery Liability

We have had another big problem arise with Alameda County. Apparently they passed an ordinance that if you did not dump your waste, which included everything; in Alameda County, you had to pay an “out of county dump fee” of $4.34 per ton to them for the years of 2011 and 2012.

We have a very large landfill run by Republic Services across the Bay in San Mateo Co., which is, quite often, your only location to dump. It is especially convenient for the West Bay contractors/trucking companies to have a dump on their side of the Bay at the end of the day. This fee was only billed to the companies that were dumping on their accounts at the dumps, not truckers just hauling in for someone else. It seems that the county did not let everyone know of this extra fee so it could be added on to their customer’s bill. You certainly can’t go back to your customers and say “oh by the way you owe me a fee I wasn’t aware of.”

Now people were getting letters from Alameda Co., billing them for past dumping fees. This is hitting people hard. We have been trying to get to the bottom of what type if any notification was given to customers of this site in San Mateo Co.
I do know that the sales person for Republic Services notified their largest customer (a local large trucking company) of these charges so they were able to add this to their customers’ bills. But once again it’s the little guy running on a very thin profit margin that is being hit by back-charges/fees for something that they knew nothing about.

I was just interrupted while writing this report with a phone call from one of my contractors about this very issue! Luckily his fee was very small, but he is very angry about the non-notification. I plan on attending a meeting with Alameda Co. in a few days when they will advertise all of their up-coming projects going out to bid, and I will be asking a lot of question about this fee!