California Construction Trucking Association (CCTA)

On December 9, CCTA, again with the invaluable help of legal counsel, drafted a letter to the last state agency to review CARB’s on-road regulations. As we stated above, the Office of Administrative Law (AOL) has until December 14 to finalize CARB on-road truck and bus regulation. On the OAL’s website, it says that the agency/office is supposed to ensure that all (and especially new) regulations are clear, necessary, legally valid, and available to the public. OAL is responsible for reviewing administrative regulations proposed by over 200 state agencies for compliance with the standards set forth in California’s Administrative Procedure Act (APA), for transmitting these regulations to the Secretary of State and for publishing regulations in the California Code of Regulations.

It is our opinion that this regulation is clearly preempted under the Supremacy Clause 2 in Article VI (6) of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes that the federal “Constitution and the Laws of the United States . . . shall be the Supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound to this and the Constitution and Laws of any State that are or found to be contrary are void and unenforceable.” Yes, the “supremacy clause” is the most important guarantor of national union. It assures that the Constitution and federal laws and treaties take precedence over state law and binds all judges to adhere to that principle in their courts.

We decided to utilize the reasons outlined in our lawsuit against CARB in federal court, as the reasons why the OAL should disapprove the regulation.