OTA Dispatch Issue 4 2017

Oregon Trucking Associations, Inc. Oregon Truck Dispatch A s the new chair of Oregon Trucking Association’s Board of Directors, I am pleased to be writing my first of several pieces for the OTA magazine. As many of you know, I was elected as Chairperson at OTA’s Leadership Conference in September and am OTA’s 1st woman chair and 1st chair originating from the Moving and Storage segment of the trucking industry. Despite these differences, I also know that I share with you, the OTA membership, our most fundamental and important professional objectives which include our collective desire to operate profitably and safely, and to provide good service for our customers and good jobs for our employees. I, like most of our members, believe that OTA has a unique ability to assist each member in attaining these objectives in their own way while giving us an opportunity to share our knowledge and experience with other members and exercise our collective voice as advocates for business interests in general and the trucking industry in particular. My first experience in visiting our legislative representatives in Salem occurred in April of 2005 when Bob Russell led me around the capitol building in order to enlist assistance from my legislators with a problem my company was having with a State Administrative office. This was an out-of-the-box attempt to do what several of our company attorneys had been unable to do, and by all accounts this first encounter was successful beyond my wildest expectations. We were able to improve our negotiating position and ultimately resolve our differences with the State entity, with little downside. This was an extremely positive and powerful lesson for me which will forever underscore the value of participation in our legislative system and speaking up when conditions warrant. Last February, I joined more than 100 other representatives from the Trucking Industry for OTA’s Trucking Day at the Capitol in Salem. This event had been held on previous occasions, but last February’s event attracted the most participants ever with more than 100 attendees, and certainly our presence as advocates for our industry was noticed by our lawmakers and their staff members. As many of you know, OTA was busy during the last session in Salem tracking nearly 300 bills presented during the session. While we can only speculate upon the impact of our visit, there is no doubt that OTA provided a positive impact for our industry in heading off, or in other cases mitigating, legislation that would have had a deleterious impact on many of our companies. Further, because a majority of our legislators represent interests not very tightly aligned with business, the importance of conveying our message to our elected officials cannot be understated. Finally, we can be certain that OTA’s presence at the capitol over the course of the session is positively correlated to the governor’s decision to include OTA in discussions regarding the infrastructure bill which has been recently passed. While we cannot view a mileage tax increase of this size as a total win, being at the table allowed us to influence the outcome in multiple favorable ways. As I write this article, I am recently returned from Washington D.C. where Jana, myself and several other members of OTA spent a day at the Nation’s Capitol, again advocating on behalf 2 2 CHAIR’S MESSAGE Diane DeAutremont OTA Chair “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.” —Thomas Jefferson