LAS VEGAS - An attorney for CUSA, which operates two bus companies in Las Vegas, says he would rather work with the Transportation Services Authority in Nevada to revamp its rules regulating charter bus companies than file suit and have a federal court throw out the regulations.
Patrick V. Fagan, an attorney from Carson City who represents Gray Line of Southern Nevada and K-T Contract Services, made his comments last month at a workshop sponsored by the Nevada TSA.
Fagan said he and his clients believe the TSA has no authority to regulate the operations of charter bus companies that are registered with the U.S. Department of Transportation. It lost that right in 1998 when Congress adopted the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st (TEA-21).
TEA-21 specifically and pointedly prohibits states, cities and counties from enacting or enforcing laws that regulate carriers subject to FMCSA jurisdiction and those DOT-registered intrastate carriers operating on an interstate route.
The federal prohibition also blocks state and local governments from regulating rates for charter bus service and limiting the provision of such service.
Nevada statues currently require charter bus companies, plus taxi and limousine operators, to have a state certificate of public convenience and necessity to be eligible to provide intrastate service. The application for the certificate is not a simple name, rank and serial number affair; rather it requires all sorts of information from operators.
In addition, operators are supposed to file all of their rates or fares with the TSA
Although TEA-21 essentially gutted state authority to regulate charter operators six years ago, it wasn't until the last year or so that resistance to state regulations began surfacing in Nevada.
Fagan challenged the TSA's authority to regulate K-T Contract Services, and an operator from northern Nevada, Bob Fairman, who has a shuttle and charter bus company called No Stress Express, began stirring up trouble.
Among other things, Fairman has attempted to enlist the support of the enforcement and litigation section of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in his fight with the TSA. He also has formed an organization called the Nevada Transportation Coalition to press the fight.
Fairman and about a dozen other operators attended last month's TSA workshop but it was Fagan who did most of the talking. With the exception of Fairman, the other operators were content to sit on their hands and listen.
Fagan said the principal state statute regulating ground transportation companies in Nevada "should not include charter (bus) service." The TSA's "statutory scheme" needs to be re-examined, he said, with an eye toward developing separate statutes for the charter bus industry.
He also said the certificate of convenience and necessity is a "burden operators should not have to deal with." And the attorney suggested that the requirement to file rates and fares with the TSA was out of touch with reality, reflecting a lack of understanding of the charter bus business.
Rates, he explained, are negotiated and change regularly. One Nevada operator said after the meeting his company has 365 different rates, one for every day of the year. "We're just like the airlines," he said.
The operator speculated that the Nevada TSA only maintains the rate and fare disclosure requirement because processing and filing the information provides job security for authority staff members.
Another operator interviewed after the meeting described the steps his company uses to circumvent the tariff reporting requirement. Otherwise, he said, the paperwork reporting burden would be horrendous and unmanageable.
While Fagan said the CUSA companies he represents would prefer to work constructively with the TSA to overhaul the charter bus regulations, he also indicated that a lawsuit is not out of the question. But Fagan also made clear that no one is questioning the right of the authority to regulate safety or verify insurance requirements.
In opening the workshop, TSA Commissioner Kimberly Maxon-Rushton said the authority was interested in improving its oversight and regulation of the charter bus industry.
And, at the end, she offered something of a mea culpa for the authority's failure to bring its regulations in line with federal law. "It takes times for states to catch up," she said.
Nevada is not the only state that continues to flaunt the TEA-21 prohibition against states regulating interstate bus operators. Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia also are hanging onto outdated regulations.