[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 48 (Thursday, April 28, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 28, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
        NEEDED AND LONG OVERDUE IS A PEACEFUL BURIAL FOR THE ICC

  (Mr. HORN asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous 
matter.)
  Mr. HORN. Mr. Speaker, attached to my remarks will be an article from 
yesterday's Wall Street Journal concerning the Interstate Commerce 
Commission [ICC]. As most of us know, that is America's oldest 
regulatory agency. Last month, it celebrated its 107th birthday. At one 
time there was great need for the ICC. Farmers were being robbed blind 
by the railroads of America. Today we have deregulation and competition 
between railroads, competition between railroads and trucks, and 
competition between water and land transportation.
  Mr. Speaker, we need to take a look at the ICC and how it functions. 
We need to rethink its mission. It has dropped from 2,000 employees in 
1980 to 630 at the present time, but it is an agency of high-paid 
commissioners and a lot of staff still looking for a mission. The ICC 
is still dealing with a 14-year-old dispute as to whether the railroads 
were charging too much to transport corn syrup between Texas and 
California, when the shipping rate has already been decided by the free 
market.
  The ICC has had little effect in the last 4 years in stopping 
railroads from giving up track. The railroads abandoned enough track to 
go round trip from Seattle to Miami and back. The length of track 
prevented from abandonment would not even be a round trip from Seattle 
to Tacoma. So much for effectiveness.
  Perhaps any legitimate functions that remain should be turned over to 
the Department of Transportation and a few administrative law judges. 
That would save the taxpayers many millions of dollars.
  Let us take another look at the ICC and give it a peaceful burial.
  Mr. Speaker, I attach an excellent article by Daniel Pearl entitled 
``ICC Keeps Truckin' Though It Has Lost Much of Its Authority.'' It 
appeared in the Wall Street Journal of April 27, 1994.

      ICC Keeps Truckin' Though It Has Lost Much of Its Authority

                           (By Daniel Pearl)

       Washington--In a large, dusty room on the fourth floor of 
     the Interstate Commerce Commission building, paper is piling 
     up all over the place. Faded blue and green binders are 
     stacked from floor to ceiling in 14 corridors, as well as on 
     desks and chairs. And every day, five days a week, clerks in 
     T-shirts haul in an estimated 16,000 more pages from the 
     nation's trucking companies.
       The papers detail how much truckers intend to charge to 
     ship everything from alpaca wool to zirconium. At a row of 
     desks near gray-draped windows, ICC examiners armed with 
     pencils, yellow highlighting pens and 47-page rule manuals 
     inspect every line of each new filing as though the nation's 
     transportation system rides on it. If a filing, or 
     ``tariff,'' passes muster, it remains in the Tariff 
     Examination Room. Then some year, it is hauled by shopping 
     cart to the Cancelled Tariff Library.


                            a metamorphosis

       It is a place Franz Kafka would have loved. The tariffs 
     have little meaning. The ICC no longer has the power to 
     regulate the shipping rates listed in the filings. So 
     companies that have products trucked don't protest the rates. 
     In fact, few people can decipher them. And most freight now 
     moves in ways that don't require them.
       But this paperwork is the fuel that helps keep Washington's 
     oldest regulatory agency going. Critics say the ICC, created 
     in 1887 to ride herd on emerging railroad monopolies, has had 
     no important function since Congress deregulated the trucking 
     and rail industries in 1980. But the agency has withstood 
     attacks by everyone from Ralph Nader to Ronald Reagan. Over 
     the past several months, attempts to cut its $45 million 
     annual funding have failed on Capitol Hill.
       It is, in short, the agency that won't die. ``If we can't 
     get rid of the ICC, I don't think we can get rid of 
     anything,'' says Republican Sen. John Danforth of Missouri.
       In Washington, even programs that attract widespread 
     ridicule develop a protective shell. Lawmakers like keeping 
     jurisdiction over independent agencies such as the ICC. 
     Regulated companies don't want to incur a regulator's wrath, 
     and some even feel more secure with the ICC around. New 
     officials at the agency become its champions. Says Gail C. 
     McDonald, the ICC's recently appointed chairwoman: ``In being 
     here, I have found we have an important jurisdiction, and I 
     feel the protections we provide the public are important 
     ones.''


                              Sticky Issue

       Others have their doubts. ``A lot of what we do is just 
     foolish,'' one longtime ICC bureaucrat says.
       In late 1991, for instance, the agency took up this sticky 
     question: Should candy canes have a classification separate 
     from candy, in a rate table that some truckers use? ``A candy 
     cane could be considered a stick of candy which has a crook 
     in the end,'' argued Bob's Candies, a confectioner in Albany, 
     GA. But a truckers' group said candy canes take up more space 
     than other sweets. The ICC sifted through briefs, depositions 
     and density tables. It still hasn't ruled. In the interim, 
     Bob's says it has persuaded truckers to carry its candy canes 
     at the candy rate.
       Meantime, the ICC also is still working on a 14-year-old 
     dispute over whether railroads were charging too much to ship 
     corn syrup to California from Texas, even though such rates 
     are now determined by the free market.


                              Making Work

       The agency's 630 employees (down from 2,000 in 1980) try to 
     make their jobs relevant. They write guidebooks, such as 
     1992's ``So You Want to Start a Small Railroad.'' Fran 
     Grimmett, who has been with the ICC for more than two 
     decades, spends three months a year compiling a list of 
     minority- and women-owned trucking companies. She developed a 
     computer database for the task and now surveys the businesses 
     every year. ``I think this is in response to a demand,'' she 
     says, although ``perhaps it didn't start out that way.''
       All of this activity is overseen by five ICC commissioners 
     (at least two must be Democrats, two Republicans). With less 
     to regulate, the job of ICC commissioner, which pays $115,000 
     a year, has become a leisurely one. The commission met 11 
     times last year, but as many sessions were canceled for lack 
     of an agenda.
       ICC commissioners can hire five staff members each, but 
     Gregory Walden, a Republican who served as a commissioner 
     most, of last year, says he had trouble finding enough work 
     for two. Mr. Walden has a reputation among the ICC staff as 
     hard-working, but says that even after researching each vote 
     thoroughly and proofreading opinions, he had plenty of time 
     to linger over the morning paper.
       Commission staffers ``are probably among the most 
     frustrated in government service,'' says Frank Wilner, author 
     of ``Comes Now the Interstate Commerce Practitioner,'' a book 
     about the agency.
       At one time, though, the ICC had real power. It set time 
     zones, decreed that trains could be racially segregated and 
     blocked truckers from going into business if they couldn't 
     prove a need for their services. Being an ICC commissioner 
     was second in prestige only to a Supreme Court justice. In 
     1944, Commissioner Joseph B. Eastman talked about ``sitting 
     in dignity and looking down on the supplicants from the 
     elevation of a judicial bench.''
       The pomp remains evident as one walks under the gargoyles 
     and columns of the ICC building's facade, past busts of four 
     former commissioners. Before ICC meetings, a clerk still 
     intones, ``All rise,'' as the commissioners walk single file 
     to their places behind a long desk, with a mural of the U.S. 
     behind them.
       Most of the ICC's clout has evaporated. In the wake of the 
     deregulation of the 1980s, the ICC now can set trucking and 
     rail prices only in situations where competition doesn't 
     exit, something that has become rare. The agency still 
     reviews railroad mergers. And it still processes applications 
     for new trucking or rail service, though it has virtually no 
     power to turn them down. A typical ICC announcement is like 
     the recent one about a $2,500 fine against an Allston, Mass., 
     auto-delivery company for operating without insurance.
       Most of the ICC's legal work still emerges from the tariff 
     filing room. The tariffs are complicated because shipping 
     rates change. While some truckers refer to mileage charts or 
     tables, many actually spell out rates for carrying each 
     product to each destination city from each origin city, as 
     well as specifying the discount for each customer. Tariffs 
     alone for Yellow Corp., a motor-carrier holding company, fill 
     200 binders. And the number of trucking concerns has doubled 
     since deregulation.
       Why do all those tariffs still have to be filed, when the 
     ICC no longer regulates trucking rates? ``The Interstate 
     Commerce Act hasn't been repealed,'' declares Charles E. 
     Langyher, chief of the Section of Tariffs. Tariff filings 
     were aimed at preventing truckers from discriminating against 
     certain customers. But now, shippers just call a rival if 
     they don't like a trucker's prices. Mr. Langyher says nobody 
     has made a rate-discrimination complaint in more than a 
     decade.


                            In the Slow Lane

       ICC officials say a manufacturer considering locating a 
     factory somewhere could use tariffs to check the local 
     trucking rates. But the manufacturer would face a daunting 
     array of tables, cross-references and revisions, as Cathy 
     Stamback demonstrates by thumbing through Schneider National 
     Inc.'s blue binders. Ms. Stamback, who works for one of six 
     tariff-watching firms that rent space at the ICC, says that 
     in 2\1/2\ hours she could find what the Wisconsin trucking 
     company charges to ship printed matter to, say, Miami from 
     Oshkosh, Wis. ``Some of this belongs across the street,'' she 
     says, nodding toward the Smithsonian Institution.
       The folks at Schneider, like many trucking companies, would 
     be happy if tariffs were, indeed, consigned to history. The 
     company says it will assign four employees and pay $20,000 in 
     filing fees this year to record its rates. To raise prices, 
     truckers must wait at least a week after filing a tariff, a 
     delay that could cost a bundle if fuel prices rose suddenly. 
     But other truckers say they like the tariff-filing 
     requirement because it keeps prices more predictable. Labor 
     groups also support it.
       Customers of those trucking companies rely on the ICC for 
     another reason. In the past few years, many have been sued by 
     the bankruptcy trustees of defunct trucking companies for 
     getting lower rates than the tariffs spelled out. Tariff 
     rates were routinely ignored in the 1980s. Richard Johnson, 
     co-owner of a carpet wholesaler in Tampa, Fla., says he 
     didn't even know tariffs still existed until he got two boxes 
     full of bills last year from the trustee of BGR 
     Transportation Co. of Calhoun, Ga.
       The ICC has helped him and hundreds like him defeat the 
     trustees' claims. Mr. Johnson says the agency decreed that 
     the tariff that came back to haunt him was invalid in the 
     first place because the now-defunct trucking company never 
     filed the proper paperwork when it changed its name. While 
     Mr. Johnson calls the ICC ``filing clerks,'' he also hopes 
     the agency sticks around.
       Under Ms. McDonald, a Democrat, the ICC is trying to make 
     tariffs more relevant. The agency has hired nine new 
     inspectors to read filings. It installed three facsimile 
     machines last month to receive copies of contracts, and it 
     plans to start making tariffs available electronically. The 
     agency has also halved its management ranks, cut paperwork 
     and set up a toll-free telephone number for complaints from 
     citizens (``We call them customers,'' the agency says). Last 
     week, the commission said it would hold 36 training seminars 
     in 29 states on a tariff law passed by Congress last year. It 
     recently held brown-bag lunches for employees to learn what 
     other employees do.


                              looking home

       Congress has an interest in keeping the ICC alive. Despite 
     the agency's lack of real power, the ICC can help lawmakers 
     look important to the folks back home. Members of Congress 
     sometimes pass on complaints to the ICC about moving 
     companies that won't pay after breaking constituents' 
     belongings. And they demand that the ICC hold public hearings 
     when a railroad asks for permission to abandon money-losing 
     stretches of track.
       Congressional intervention is largely for show, though. In 
     the past four fiscal years, railroads abandoned enough track 
     to reach Miami from Seattle and back; the track the ICC 
     stopped railroads from giving up would barely make the round 
     trip from Seattle to Tacoma. And the ICC imposed just one 
     fine against an errant mover in that time. (ICC officials say 
     that a phone call is usually enough to get a moving company 
     to shape up, and that the agency puts conditions on many of 
     the rail abandonments it approves.)
       Lawmakers' stature depends partly on how many agencies 
     their committees oversee. Proposals to eliminate the ICC have 
     gone nowhere within the Senate and House committees with 
     jurisdiction over the ICC. And when House members outside two 
     such panels offered an amendment last fall to kill the 
     agency's funding, 42 of the 58 committee members voted 
     against it. Rep. John Kasich of Ohio, who co-sponsored the 
     amendment, says a fellow Republican ``told me he voted 
     against it because I was messing with his jurisdiction.''
       That support also was evident at a celebration last month 
     to mark the ICC's 107th birthday. The agency formally 
     unveiled a bronze bust of Clyde Bruce Aitchison, a 
     commissioner from 1917 to 1952, as an eight-man military 
     guard presented the colors and a 20-member chorus sang ``God 
     Bless America.'' House Public Works and Transportation 
     Committee Chairman Norman Mineta displayed an alarm clock 
     that plays ``I've Been Working on the Railroad.'' And the 
     California Democrat told the agency he would defend it 
     against those wanting to cut off ``the funding it needs so 
     all of you can do your very, very important jobs.''

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