On Wednesday, September 2, Chauvel & Glatt’s latest news update, New Bus Leasing Regulations, was forwarded by California Bus Association (CBA) to all of its members. In the organization’s newsletter, CBA also cited a comment on this regulation made by Suzanne Rhode at the American Bus Association.
Her full comments are:
“Following the August 25 filing deadline, we are now in the position of waiting to hear what FMCSA decides to do. They have several options:
- Deny the petitions and proceed to start enforcing as of January 2017
- Grant the petitions, in whole or partially, and pull the rule back to reconsider it – or simply drop parts of it, without further action
- Grant the petitions, in whole or partially, and then seek further comment;
- Grant the petitions and start a completely new rulemaking process.
However, keep in mind the following:
- There is no time deadline for FMCSA to respond to the petitions.
- Filing petitions does NOT stay the compliance date of the rule, i.e. even if FMCSA does not respond to the petitions by Jan. 2017, they can proceed to start enforcing the rule.
- When they do make a determination of the various petitions, they are required to prepare and issue a notice of their decision to each petitioner – although they may consolidate all the petitions that were filed relating to this rule, so that, in otherwords, they would just need to provide one explanation of their decision to satisfy the group of consolidated petitions.”
