The next Membership and Board of Directors meetings will be held Wednesday April 13, 2022. The meetings will be held IN-PERSON at the MMTA Office on Whitten Road in Augusta.

Recently an issue developed in Maine regarding an MMTA member who was stopped by the Maine State Police, Troop K, and inspected at roadside. Several questions regarding the weight of the vehicle and how it was registered prompted many calls from this member and other well drillers who were inquiring how to properly register a well drilling rig and what the legal weight can be. This article is intended to outline the regulations involved and explain the process for properly registering a well drilling rig in Maine.

Most well drilling rigs are over the legal road limit for both gross and axle weights, based on their configurations. This is due to the tools and equipment that they are set up for in order to perform the job they are designed to do. As such, the vehicles cannot be registered in the same manner as trucks or truck tractors and must be registered as Special Mobile Equipment, Class A.

April 1, 2022

8:00am - MMTA Office

April 7, 2022

9:00am - MMTA Office

April 13, 2022

7:30am - MMTA Office

MMTA

It’s back… live and in-person. The 2022 Maine Professional Truck Driving Championships (to be held at Dysart’s in Hermon) and the 2022 Maine Professional Technician Skills Competition (to be held at EMCC in Bangor) will both be held on May 21, 2022 – a day that we have termed “CHAMPIONSHIP SATURDAY”.

Given our two-year hiatus, we are hoping to make this year’s Maine Professional Truck Driving Championships the best ever by encouraging a tremendous response from competitors wanting to prove they are the best truck driver in Maine. Make plans to join us for a fun day of camaraderie and good old trucking tradition, whether as a competitor, judge or spectator to see the unbelievable skills displayed by Maine’s best drivers.

The U.S. Postal Service has finalized a contract to replace its mail truck fleet with almost all gasoline-powered models, drawing an angry response from Biden administration officials who unsuccessfully pushed the agency to buy electric vehicles instead.

The record of decision signed Feb. 23 represents the culmination of a failed lobbying effort by the Environmental Protection Agency and top Biden administration officials to persuade the Postal Service to shift course. The independent agency can now move forward with its $6 billion plan to begin purchasing as many as 165,000 mail trucks over the next 10 year...

The Department of Transportation’s latest Significant Rulemakings Report indicates which key rulemakings its agencies, including the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, will focus on moving forward over the course of this year.

Chief among these are actions pertaining to rulemakings on autonomous trucks, broker financial responsibility, and Safety Fitness Procedures.

The Department of Transportation is proposing to add new drug testing guidelines that would permit motor carriers to test truck drivers using oral fluid samples as an alternative to urine testing.

“This will give employers a choice that will help combat employee cheating on urine drug tests and provide a more economical, less intrusive means of achieving the safety goals of the program,” DOT said Feb. 25 in a 119-page pre-publication Federal Register announcement. “Unlike directly observed urine collections, an oral fluid collection is much less intrusive on the tested employee’s privacy.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposed rulemaking to further restrict emissions of soot-forming nitrogen oxide (NOx) by heavy-duty diesel and gasoline engines starting in model year 2027.

EPA’s intention is to reduce NOx emissions from trucks by as much as 60% in 2045.

Truck drivers will no longer have to provide employers with a list each year of their traffic violations, a federal rule change that drew overwhelming support from drivers and carriers.

“This requirement is largely duplicative of a separate rule that requires each motor carrier to make an annual inquiry to obtain the motor vehicle record (MVR) for each driver it employs from every state in which the driver holds or has held a CMV [commercial motor vehicle] operator’s license or permit in the past year,” the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration stated in its final rule, scheduled to be published on Wednesday.

With 3G wireless networks across the country going offline, a rising concern is the functionality of electronic logging devices. Fortunately, if you are among those to lose service due to the 3G sunset, procedures are in place to keep you on the road.

In a final rule published in the Federal Register Monday, March 7, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is updating its regulations to expand the area on windshields where certain safety technologies can be mounted.