Appeals court denies OOIDA rehearing on ELDs

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Assn. (OOIDA) says its petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit for a rehearing of its legal case against the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate has been denied.

The three-judge panel had ruled against OOIDA’s original lawsuit back in October, prompting the group to file this now-defunct petition in December.

“It’s clear now that we have to pull out all the stops to convince lawmakers and the new Trump administration of the need to set aside the ELD mandate,” Jim Johnston, OOIDA’s president and CEO, said in a statement, adding that his organization is preparing for the “next phase” of its ELD mandate challenge with an appeal to the Supreme Court. Yet he added that OOIDA will also continue to pursue the issue on the congressional side.

OOIDA still contends that “the government’s excuses for mandating ELDs are weak” and fail to justify violating the Fourth Amendment rights of professional truck drivers.

Todd Spencer, OOIDA’s executive vice president, told Fleet Owner in an interview late last year that there’s been far more “take” than “give” in recent years where regulatory oversight of trucking is concerned. But he’s hopeful the changeover to the Trump administration might encourage a “fresh look” at highway safety as a whole.

“The regulatory regime has been on steroids for the past few years. Is there a cumulative effect? There sure is,” he explained.

“The kind of mindset in the regulatory/legislative community right now is that more is better,” Spencer stressed. “But although there’s been more regulation and more compliance than there’s ever been, crash numbers keep going up, not down. So what the very people making all of these rules should be asking is, ‘What the hell is going on?’”