California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

April is here, so that means we’re exactly a quarter through the year. I hope everyone has been able to pay their taxes, as April 15 may have passed by the time you read this.

It has come to my attention that CARB and the EPA in general are extremely hypocritical. They condemn us for driving our supposedly (EPA approved) dirty deadly diesel trucks and causing death and disease to everyone who lives close to a freeway. At the same time the Volkswagen Jetta TDI diesel was rated higher on the green vehicle scale than the Toyota Prius for the model years 2009-2010. Isn’t this interesting?

So far, 2013 has been a pretty good year for me and our trucking business. We have made it through much of the first quarter working regularly and the Winter CCTA Board Meeting in February was memorable.

We had a very good turn-out and almost record participation. If you missed it, you missed out on a great deal of information and a wonderful time of fellowship with people from all over the state. I strongly suggest if you have never attended a board meeting, you should try to get to the next one in Oakland in June of this year. This is your business and you owe it to yourself to experience first hand what happens at these informative industry meetings.

Here we are in the middle of one of the coldest winters in memory and I just heard an environmentalist on TV telling everyone how global warming is getting worse by the day. In San Diego, which has one of the most temperate climates in the world, we’ve had a month that was really cold, including a week it was actually down in the 20’s, which was colder than any time in the last 25 years at my house.

January is the beginning of a new year and hopefully it will be good work wise for all of our members.

As we begin the New Year, in what appears to be shaping-up as a challenging or maybe a stumbling economy, the association is trying to cut our expenses as much as possible. I recently spoke with Lee and for the foreseeable future we are planning on having all of our board meetings in Ontario, close to the airport and office to save money on travel and room expenses since the staff and many members live close by. With the cost of almost everything going up we need to save money wherever possible.

As 2012 grinds to a close, I now regularly look back and think about my year and I’m glad that it is almost over. Optimism these days is a thoughtful commodity; four or five months ago Lee talked me into sharing issues associated with my heath that at first I did not really want to disclose. He thought I should share it, so I reluctantly agreed and thought it time for an update.

If you missed the annual board meeting in San Diego, we got some important work done and also had a great time. We had our annual meeting at the same place and time as the California Tow Truck Association. The Western States Tow Show was also held at the same time and it was very interesting. We saw many heavy-duty recovery demonstrations and some equipment manufacturers had heavy-wreckers costing nearly $500,000.

The summer is quickly coming to an end and I have to admit that I’m feeling some of the effects of my age. I say this not only because time is flying by at an incredible rate but also because I turned 60 this year.

This brings me to an important subject that most of us don’t want to think about but should and that is age and its effects on how we preform within our profession.

So does age slow our reaction time while driving?

As the summer draws to a seasonal slow-down, we are also closing in on another election year in California and across this nation. The groups behind three of the four propositions to increase taxes have been running their propaganda in support of Propositions 30 (Brown), 38 (Munger) and 39 (Perez).
Prop 30 is our illustrious Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown’s attempt to squeeze more sales and income tax money out of our pockets to give more, supposedly, to schools (our kids), but we all know it will be going to pay for lavish police, fire and over-paid academic administrators pensions and benefits. We seem to throw billions upon billions of dollars at these union entities and they never seem to get enough money.

I want to thank everyone for their support both spiritually and financially while my wife and I have been dealing with my cancer relapse. The funds raised for us at the Annual Meeting have been very helpful to us.
It has been two months since I went into the hospital for 19 days and even though I have had the last test called a PET scan to see if any cancer is left in my body, as I write this, I haven’t found out the results of the test. Incidentally, PET stands for “positron emission tomography” scan; it is an imaging test that uses a radioactive substance called a tracer to look for disease in the body.

I’m sorry to let you all know that I am not able to attend the upcoming June board meeting or write my usual monthly article due to my recent cancer treatments. Nothing is easy as they say and cancer for sure isn’t at all.

The truth is that over the last three or four months I have been fortunate to get some successful chemotherapy, and extensive treatment pre-qualification tests. Most recently we were able to harvest of my own AD 34 autologous stem cells that hopefully won’t cause any rejection problems as part of my cancer treatment.

I have been in the trucking business since October 1 1973—isn’t it funny how some dates stick in your head. I remember being tired of college and since I had been around construction and heavy equipment all of my life, I thought I’ll get into the dump truck business.
My first truck was a 1980 Brockway 2 axle tractor. Most people with the exception of a few of us old guys have never heard of this brand and honestly I think they were out of business by the time I bought it. The two years I owned it gave me a real education  in what I wanted and what

I didn’t want to do with a truck but it was cheap and old and gave me my start.