WASHINGTON - When the U.S. Senate returns from its spring recess April 4, at the top of its work agenda will be the six-year highway and public transportation funding and reauthorization bill.

Last month, the House passed its version of the legislation.

Also last month, separate Senate committees approved two halves of the bill and sent them to the Senate floor where they are being merged into one all-encompassing bill.

Although there are substantive differences between the House and Senate versions, both pieces of legislation call for spending the same amount -- $283.9 billion - during the next six years on highway and transit projects. That's up from the $218 billion spent from fiscal 1998 through 2003.

Charter bus rules
The version of the bill that emerged from the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs last month had one very good piece of news for the motorcoach industry. Deleted from the legislation was the so-called charter bus provision.

The bill, as originally considered by the banking committee, contained a proviso that would have allowed public transit agencies to conduct a broad range of local charter services without fear of violating the charter prohibitions currently in federal law.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., chairman of the Senate banking committee, "kept his word and removed the poison charter provision from the bill, but left all of the good provisions in," said one coach industry lobbyist. The "good" in the bill includes provisions that would require public transit agencies to involve private operators to a greater extent in providing and planning for transit services.

Shelby had been the focus of lobbying by the Coalition of Private Transportation Associations, the Alabama Motorcoach Association and others. The coalition includes the United Motorcoach Association, the American Bus Association, the National School Transportation Association and about a dozen other private national and state groups.

Last month, the groups conducted a fly-in to lobby congressional representatives on the highway/public transit bill, plus other key issues.

The American Public Transportation Association, which represents hundreds of public transit agencies and has been pushing hard for less restrictive charter-service regulations, wasn't the least bit happy about the charter bus provision being lifted from the Senate bill.

Public vs. private
The issue has become a bitter one between the public and private bus sectors. Efforts to resolve the differences outside of Congress have failed. The extent of the difficulty was underscored last month when William Millar, president of APTA, was interviewed by BUS Ride magazine.

In the interview, Millar was quoted as saying he thinks the private and public sectors "should get back to the bargaining table and figure something out that both the private and public interests can live with. Then we can go jointly to the Capitol and say this is what we have worked out in the best interests of both sectors."

While such conciliatory talk comes out of one side of Millar's mouth, out of the other comes APTA public policy positions which, in effect, seek to put private bus operators out of business and use their tax dollars to do it. (See Editorial on Page 8.)

While the Senate committee "did the right thing" by removing the onerous charter service provision, the version of the bill passed by the House still includes provisions that pose a major threat to the coach industry. The House bill would throw the charter service issue to the Federal Transit Administration for a public rulemaking. A report attached to the House bill specifies that the FTA make local charter exemptions part of a rulemaking.

That possibility strikes terror in the hearts of many coach industry representatives. They have no confidence whatsoever the FTA will consider the interests of the private sector given its past record of failing to enforce the existing rules. They think it impossible to expect the FTA to write fair charter service rules and then enforce them.

A separate bill?
The motorcoach industry is pushing for a separate bill to address the issue of charter service rules for transit agencies, while APTA is fighting to have a House-Senate conference committee deal with the issue as part of the highway reauthorization bill.

The coach industry, most observers believe, faces a tough, uphill battle to get the charter service provisions out of the House bill when the House-Senate conference committee begins its work.

While the charter provisions continue to loom large, other sections of the House version offer both positives and negatives for the coach industry. One plus is an amendment that was tacked onto the House bill that would lift the burden of vicarious liability from motorcoach lending and leasing companies.

Under vicarious liability, when there is a crash, the liability is shared by the company that is leasing the bus to a motorcoach company, even though the leasing company was not directly involved in operating the vehicle. What has happened as this concept has grown is that TRAC leases for motorcoaches have all but disappeared in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Florida and other states where vicarious liability is allowed.

One coach leasing company said that eliminating vicarious liability would be a very good thing for the finance and coach industries.

The issue of vicarious liability has gotten wrapped up in the tort reform movement that has become popular on Capital Hill.

A loss on tolls
On another important issue, the House voted down an amendment that would have limited tolling on interstates to pay for the construction of new lanes. Instead, the House kept language that allows pilot toll projects on existing interstates, as well as additional capacity. (See March 15 issue of Bus & Motorcoach News.)

Adding tolls to existing interstates is seen as having a deleterious impact on the already narrow profit margins of most motorcoach operators.

The battle to limit interstate tolling, which was spearheaded by Rep Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., pitted highway builders and operators against highway users, primarily the trucking industry.

Elsewhere in the House bill is a far-reaching provision that extends federal motor carrier regulations for commercial motor vehicles to 15-passenger vans used for commercial purposes in interstate commerce.

The UMA and other private-sector groups have been pushing for such a provision for years. Limousine associations and others have opposed it, however.

"UMA has long supported full compliance with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations in for-hire interstate operations no matter what vehicle type is used," said Norman Littler, UMA senor vice president for government and industry relations.

The NTSA was successful in getting a provision added to the House bill that will prohibit the use of 15-passenger vans to transport children to and from school and events related to school.