FMCSA Publishes HAZMAT Safety Permit ICR Revision

Today the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published a 60-day ICR renewal-revision notice in the Federal Register (78 FR 74221-74222) to revise and update the information collection request supporting the HAZMAT Safety Permit program under 49 CFR §385.401 et seq.

This ICR provides for the collection of information by FMCSA as part of the permit application process under 49 CFR §385.405(a). It also covers the requirement under 49 CFR §385.407(b)(2) to maintain records of communications between the carrier and the hazmat transport driver. The driver is required to “make contact with the carrier at the beginning and end of each duty tour, and at the pickup and delivery of each permitted load” {49 CFR §385.415(c)(1)}

ICR Burden Revision

As part of its requirement to periodically renew this ICR, FMCSA is updating the burden requirements for this ICR based upon changes in the number of affected hazmat carriers requesting permits and the number of hazmat loads requiring the maintenance of communications records. The table below shows the change in those numbers over the last two renewal requests.

	2007	2010	2013
Motor Carriers	2515	1425	1382
Hazmat Trips	1.6 Million	4.2 Million	11.6 Million
Annual Burden	131,000	350,000	967,000

FMCSA estimates the annual burden hours by assuming that each driver takes a total of five minutes during each hazmat trip to record his required contacts with the carrier. The earlier data comes from the Federal Register notices (72 FR 39879-39880 and 75 FR 54941-54942) for the respective 60-day ICR notice.

There is no mention of the burden associated with filling out the permit application (Form MCS-150B). While this is a relatively complex form, I don’t suspect that it will take more than an hour to complete the application. This means that the 1382 burden hours for filling out that form will be lost in the rounding of the number calculated for the communications recording requirement.

Public Comments

FMCSA is soliciting public comments on this ICR notice. Comments may be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # FMCSA-2013-0349). Comments will need to be submitted by February 10^th, 2014.