California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

The first results of what is said to be the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of the health effects of exposure to new technology diesel engines has found no evidence of gene-damaging effects in the animals studied, and only a few mild effects on the lungs, according to a report issued by the Health Effects Institute.

The Advanced Collaborative Engine Study is exposing rats and mice for 16 hours a day to emissions from a heavy-duty diesel engine meeting stringent 2007 US EPA standards that reduce emissions of fine particles and other pollutants by over 90% from levels emitted by older engines.

The study was conducted by the Health Effects Institute in collaboration with the Coordinating Research Council. The Health Effects Institute is an independent, non-profit research institute funded jointly by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and industry.

The Pacific Legal Foundation is, with the help of California Construction Trucking Association, the Southern California Contractors Association, United Contractors and our friend Skip Brown with Delta Construction, strapping on the off-road diesel regulation waiver requested by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in March.

This effort, if successful, could halt major enforcement on the off-road rule, because, through regulatory over-reach CARB is trying to control emissions from equipment that is under the purview of the federal EPA.

The federal Clean Air Act requires California and every other state, to comply with uniform federal emission standards for motor vehicles.  California, under provisions of the expanded CAA (1970) may seek a waiver from this requirement and adopt its own, stricter emissions standards, if the state can demonstrate a “need” to meet “compelling and extraordinary” conditions.

Governor Brown recently announced the appointment of an employee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a law firm disguised as an environmental organization, to a high-level administrative position at the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA).
Gina Solomon, 47, of San Francisco, has been appointed deputy secretary for science and health at the agency. She has been a senior scientist for NRDC since 1996 and a clinical professor of health sciences at the University of California, San Francisco since 2011. She served as an associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco since 2006 and as an assistant clinical professor of medicine from 1998 to 2006.

The California Construction Trucking Association joined a broad coalition of more than 50 other business, labor and local government organizations last month that sent a letter to the Attorney General Kamala Harris, expressing concern over her decision to join a CEQA lawsuit challenging the
San Diego Association of Governments’ (SANDAG) Regional Transportation Plan (RTP).   

The reason so many groups outside the San Diego region chose to get involved in this effort is because the AG’s lawsuit could set dangerous precedent that will hurt every other region in the state’s efforts to update their RTPs as required by law.

Caltrans is sharing a chart they call “The Mountain” that shows the days of $13 billion in highway spending in California ends this year. During the next fiscal year and without legislative action, for the foreseeable future, Caltrans spending will drop by nearly 50 percent.

All of the 2006 bond money and all of the federal stimulus money will be spent by the end of the 2012-13 fiscal year, leaving the motor fuel excise tax, local government half-cent sales taxes for transportation and an ever-declining federal Highway Trust Fund to support California roadwork.

May 8, 2012 | California Watch

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not protecting public health and has violated federal law by failing to review air quality standards, according to a new lawsuit filed by the American Lung Association (ALA), the state air board and a consortium of states.

A brief filed late last week by the EPA in federal court in Washington, D.C., states that it does not plan to complete the mandatory review until Aug. 15, 2013 – about 22 months after the legal deadline.

Mark Steyn - OC Register, 4-6-12 (Excerpted)

Early in April, before the fawning toadies at the Associated Press luncheon, President Obama attacked Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan to prevent America plunging into the debt abyss ($15.6-trillion+) and at least keep its fingernails clawing at the clumps on the cliff edge for a couple more decades.
Don’t believe him, sneered the president. “Hundreds of national parks” will close. Parts of the country will see “complete elimination of air traffic control.” We will be unable to “combat violent crime.” Two million mothers and young children will wind up without “access to healthy food”. Anything else? You bet. The Ryan plan will doom everything everywhere – “the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food that we eat.”

“This is not conjecture,” said the president. “These are facts.”

The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put its stamp of approval this month on the California Air Resources Board’s on-road truck and bus, drayage and Large-Spark Ignition (LSI) regulations.

You can expect the waiver for the off-road rule to come very soon.  “It’s in the queue, wafting to be signed,” an EPA spokesman told California Transportation News.

EPA’s approval of the truck regulation takes the form of final action to approve a revision to the California State Implementation Plan (SIP) submitted by CARB, which makes these regulations federally enforceable. This means that federal EPA can now enforce these regulations and that it would take both an act of Congress and the state legislature to repeal the rules legislatively—highly unlikely occurrences under the best of circumstances—and impossible as things stand now in either Sacramento or Washington.

Another American Green Business Goes South – “Nyet” East?

Batteries made in America for America and backed by America. That’s how politicians hailed Ener1.

The company tapped the country’s top scientists at Argonne National Lab in Illinois, and U.S. taxpayers pledged up to $118 million in federal stimulus funds and $80 million in state and local incentives to help Ener1 produce cutting-edge battery technology for electric cars and the U.S. military.
“This is about the future. And the question is which nation is going to seize the future. Some nation is going to grab it by the throat. One of the nations of the world is going to lead the world in green energy and technology,” Vice President Joe Biden said in January 2011 in a speech praising federal support for Ener1 at its facility in Indiana.

A new petition has hit the streets, and it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Jerry Brown and his tax-raising friends at the uber-left California Teachers Federation are circulating a measure to raise YOUR Taxes! And they’re doing so under the guise that it actually helps our schools. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
California’s government is already out of control. Now they want MORE of your Tax dollars and we all know it’s to pay for their bloated pensions and continued government waste.

Every two years the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issues a look at its guess about the future of employment nationwide and when the report came out this month, it looked good for trucking and slowly better for construction. 

The report, which covers 2010-2020 time period covers more than 30 occupational groups, say that trucking (broken down into two segments) should see more than 660,000 jobs created in what it calls “Transportation and Material Moving Occupations.”

Heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers will grow from 1,604,800 in the field today to 1,934,900 million in 2020, a healthy jump of of 330,100 folks behind the wheel—a 20.6 percent growth rate.

A Sacramento area truck broker received a 10 years and 10 months in prison sentence for defrauding trucking companies, using the Internet to both land loads, then broker them to other truckers.

Kulwant Singh Gill, 53, was sentenced last month in Sacramento by U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton for a scheme to defraud trucking firms out of payments for interstate freight deliveries. Gill was ordered to pay $443,388 in restitution to the victims. He also will be subject to three years of supervised release following his prison term.  There is no early release from federal sentences.