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This story appears in the March 7 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has begun sending an initial batch of 23,000 Compliance, Safety, Accountability program warning letters to fleets as the agency begins concrete interventions in its new program.

Over the next several months, a total of at least 50,000 warning letters will be sent, Boyd Stephenson, manager of safety and security for American Trucking Associations, told Transport Topics.

Warning letters advise carriers that their performance merited “alert” status by falling below acceptable levels on at least one of CSA’s Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs.

Those BASICs, such as unsafe or fatigued driving, form the statis-tical heart of CSA’s safety meas-urement system, which assigns a percentage ranking on each BASIC and establishes thresholds. Warning letters are sent when threshold levels are exceeded.

“A review of [carrier name] safety data shows a lack of compliance with motor carrier safety regulations and suggests that your safety performance has fallen to an unacceptable level,” John Van Steenburg, director of FMCSA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance, writes in these alert letters.

Agency spokeswoman Candice Tolliver said both trucking and bus companies will receive letters over the next two months, but she couldn’t say exactly how many went to truck fleets.

About 8% of carriers will receive warning letters, based on FMCSA statistics that count 650,000 carriers.

Stephen Keppler, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, said the warning letters are an important step because they quadruple the number of carriers facing active FMCSA intervention. Under the former SafeStat system, the agency took action against just 2% of carriers.

Keppler said it was difficult to judge industry safety levels based on the number of warning letters because there is no earlier point of comparison to show whether progress was being made.

Warning letters can be followed by off-site or on-site investigations if carriers’ performance doesn’t improve. There is no time limit for responding to the letters.

The agency’s enforcement options include creation of a cooperative safety plan, imposition of civil penalties, suspension or revocation of vehicle registration or revocation of operating authority.

“Just because you get a warning letter doesn’t mean you are a bad carrier,” Keppler said, noting that the agency’s tightest focus will be on 7,900 highest-risk carriers with the worst safety performance.

“The important thing is that folks who get these things pay attention,” he said, adding that he was encouraged that more than half of carriers who received warnings during the CSA pilot test period took effective remedial action.

“Our message to members is if you are in alert status, don’t freak out,” said Joe Rajkovacz, director of regulatory affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers

Association. He said the letters were an expected step, based on the gradual implementation of CSA.

FMCSA chose the gradual approach to mailing the letters, ATA’s Stephenson said, because “the agency was concerned about overwhelming both the industry and their [own] staff by sending them out all at once.”

Fleets receiving the letters are subject to increased roadside inspections.

To help fleets improve compliance, the agency posted a “tip sheet” on its website that advises what they can do after a letter arrives.

Fleets are advised to conduct a detailed analysis of their safety data and take steps to improve compliance.

Those steps include checking data for accuracy, correcting any errors, understanding the Safety Measurement System used to compute the scores and using a detailed analysis to improve compliance.

Meanwhile, a new report highlighted FMCSA’s plan to sharply increase funding and staffing for CSA.

The Feb. 25 report by the Government Accountability Office said the agency requested $78 million in its CSA budget for fiscal 2012, compared with $9.5 million it spent in fiscal 2010.

The report was requested by the Republican and Democratic chairmen of the congressional transportation appropriations subcommittees as well as their ranking minority members, who expressed concern about past funding levels.

In total, FMCSA contemplates having 696 employees working full time on the program, the report said. By comparison, 45 people worked on the program in 2009, with just five of them full-time employees.