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A proposed federal rule that triples to $3,000 the annual registration fee for large hazardous materials motor carriers but maintains a fee of $300 for small carriers places an unfair burden on large carriers, American Trucking Associations and National Tank Truck Carriers said in written comments opposing the new rule.

About 7,000 of the 41,000 hazmat businesses in the United States would be affected. The federal government defines a small motor carrier as one with revenue of $25.5 million or less. Size standards would be different for nontrucking companies such as manufacturers.

The ATA and NTTC comments were sent earlier this month to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in response to the agency’s rule, proposed in February.

PHMSA proposed raising the fee to increase funding for federal grants to states to train emergency response teams and to create emergency response plans for hazmat incidents.

The fee increase would be put into effect either later this year or early in 2011, PHMSA said.

The doubling of funding for the Hazardous Materials Emergency Preparedness grants program — to $28 million from $14 million — was authorized by Congress, PHMSA said.

PHMSA said that increasing the registration fees only for large carriers “will affect entities that can more easily absorb the increase.”

But ATA’s Richard Moskowitz, vice president and regulatory affairs counsel, disputed the characterization by PHMSA that the $3,000 fee won’t be hard for large carriers to pay.

“This is not true, especially during the current economic climate where some of the largest motor carriers are suffering staggering losses and are struggling to survive,” Moskowitz stated.

The agency said there are approximately 41,000 hazmat shippers and carriers currently registered. Of that total, small businesses and not-for-profit organizations make up 83%, or 34,025 companies.

Currently only 6,975, or 17%, of the companies registered are classified as large businesses, PHMSA said.

Instead of making large carriers exclusively pay for the increase in emergency planning funding, Moskowitz and John Conley, president of NTTC, suggested that PHMSA come up with a more equitable way of assessing the fees and step up efforts to locate violators who fail to register with the agency. That would increase the size of the potential funding pool, they said.

“While we understand the need to increase grant funding, we believe that PHMSA needs to do a better job of promoting and enforcing the registration requirements,” Moskowitz told Transport Topics.

“The more people that PHMSA can bring into its registration program, the lower the fee per registrant,” Moskowitz said. “They’ve got limited staff, they’ve got a lot of issues to work on and this one just hasn’t risen to the top of their priorities list.”

But Moskowitz said that if Congress wants the grant program to be at a higher authorized level, the funding burden should be equally distributed among all the shippers and carriers in the hazmat industry “rather than singling out a subset.”

“Rather than penalizing the people who are paying the fees and doing what they’re supposed to do, let’s go after some of those who have not,” Moskowitz said. “We know they’re out there.”

Conley agreed with ATA.

“We’re not at all saying, ‘Let’s let the small business carriers carry the load’,” Conley said. “We’re saying, ‘Let’s broaden the pool of people who are going to be paying’.”

Although neither Moskowitz nor Conley said they knew how many shippers and carriers are not registered for hazmat transportation, Conley said he believes the number is large.

Conley suggested that to catch violators, PHMSA should improve enforcement of the registration requirement by checking registration stickers at roadside inspections and increasing the fine for failing to register.

“If fines were increased the word will get out very quickly,” Conley said.

Conley also said he is convinced that PHMSA has the ability to pull out the names of companies dodging the registration fee from its databases, or by checking against other Department of Transportation databases.

“With enhanced computer programs, the myriad of registration requirements at the federal and local levels, and new programs like CSA 2010, we recommend a renewed effort to grow the pool of companies that pay the hazmat fee, rather than continuing to raise the fees on the compliant companies that already have registered,” Conley wrote to the agency in a March 9 letter.

Conley said PHMSA’s registration fee assessment system is plagued with inherent inequities.

“A tank-truck carrier with a revenue of $26 million is treated the same as a billion-dollar chemical or petroleum company or a multimillion revenue trucking company,” Conley stated.