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This story appears in the March 2 print edition of Transport Topics.

In response to a proposal to more than double annual registration fees on interstate trucking companies, American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves said the program created to collect and distribute the fees should be abolished.

In a Feb. 20 letter to the chairman of the board overseeing the Unified Carrier Registration agreement and the governors of all 50 states, Graves wrote that ATA “believes it is time to repeal UCR,” just four years after Congress created it to replace the Single State Registration System.

Graves suggested replacing UCR with “direct federal payments to the states through the existing federal Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program monies.” He said the roughly $100 million in funding would be “offset by an increase in the existing federal diesel fuel tax of a fraction of a penny per gallon.”

Separately, Graves sent a letter also on Feb. 20 to Avelino Gutierrez, chairman of the UCR board and staff counsel for the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, stating the proposed fee increase is “unwarranted and places an extremely heavy burden on the interstate motor carrier industry.”

The flare-up in the battle over registration fees comes after the board charged with recommending the level of the levies agreed to suggest that fees be more than doubled to make up for significant shortfalls (click here for previous Premium Content story).

UCR was created by Congress in 2005 as a replacement for SSRS and initially was seen by ATA and others as a way of reducing registration fees.

SSRS collected fees only from for-hire carriers, at a rate of $10 per truck, while UCR collects flat registration fees based on the number of vehicles in a carrier’s fleet from for-hire and private carriers, as well as freight forwarders and brokers.

The fees officially are set by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Larry Minor, an associate administrator for FMCSA, told Transport Topics the agency expects to receive the recommended fees for 2010 from the UCR board in the near future.

Graves said the UCR board has “taken the easy way out and opted for an increase in taxes on those compliant carriers that have been paying the fees. These companies will now be called on to pay both for themselves and for the dishonest and negligent carriers that have failed to pay.”

Graves also said he was concerned this “might very likely be only the first in a series of spiraling increases, as higher fees lead to greater carrier noncompliance and still lower collections.”

Gutierrez told TT that “if there were a replacement source of revenue,” states might consider a change to the program, but “unless I were to see the specifics of what a replacement system or program would look like, I couldn’t say whether it would be better or not than what we have.”

After receiving the recommendations from the UCR board, Minor said FMCSA was planning a quick notice of proposed rulemaking and then a final rule “so that states can do what they have to do to get those fees collected in 2010.”

Gutierrez said the recommendations had “not been formally sent up” to FMCSA for their review.