Highway Technical Corrections Act of 2007

Floor Speech

HIGHWAY TECHNICAL CORRECTIONS ACT OF 2007 -- (Senate - April 16, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. PRYOR. Mr. President, I rise to talk about an amendment that has been filed, which may or may not be offered. I wanted to alert the Senate to the possibility of an amendment that deals with moving companies--companies that move families, move furniture, et cetera, from city to city and across State lines--in fact, move them all over the country.

This amendment touches on a bipartisan provision that the Commerce Committee handled 3 years ago, which was, I guess, led by Senators Inouye, Stevens, Lott, and myself. We basically acknowledged that there has been a problem in the moving industry for quite some time. I don't want to go into great detail, but I will be glad to if Senator Bond comes down and offers his amendment.

I want to give a little bit of background. Basically, if you look at the statistics, since 2001, there have been about 25,000 official complaints with the Department of Transportation related to household good carriers transporting goods in interstate commerce. These complaints do cover a wide range of abusive household good carrier practices--everything from fraudulent cost estimates to lost and even damaged goods. So they really do cover the waterfront. However, the most outrageous of these complaints, in my view, is what they call ``hostage goods.''

What happens here is a moving company will move goods, and they will hold a consumer's possessions hostage until they pay thousands of dollars in excess of the original estimate. It is hard to believe that people would treat each other this way, but we have seen this thousands of times around the country, where a moving company will hold goods hostage because they want to chisel more money out of the customer.

Three years ago now, in the Commerce Committee, we looked at this situation. We understood the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration only had five employees assigned for the entire Nation when it comes to household goods and those complaints. Obviously, we had a problem. We worked on a solution. Again, this was a very bipartisan solution.

Part of the solution was to authorize State attorneys general and State consumer protection officials--they are not always AGs; it depends on the State. Usually they are attorneys general offices, but they don't have to be. It would allow the State to enforce certain Federal household goods consumer protection laws and regulations as determined by the Secretary of Transportation. This set up a partnership between the State governments and the Federal Government. We think it has been working well. We are hearing positive feedback.

State attorneys general, back in January of 2004, sent a letter, signed by 48 State attorneys general, saying they would like to have this authority. Let me tell you why. Probably, they have had similar experiences that I had when I was in the attorney general's office in Arkansas. I had a friend of mine who had moved from Florida back to Arkansas; he was moving back with his family, et cetera, et cetera. Literally, his goods--everything he owned--were held hostage by one of these unscrupulous moving companies. Naturally, as the attorney general, I thought surely we could help him. We started looking at it and learned that we were preempted by Federal law. I think he filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation, but let me ask my colleagues, who is going to be better at enforcing this and doggedly pursuing relief for their citizens, the State attorney general or the U.S. DOT in Washington--again, with five employees for the whole Nation? That is a pretty easy answer, and that is the State AGs. This is something we crafted, and we believe it is balanced. It came out of committee unanimously. There was compromise. Two Democrats and two Republicans worked together to get compromise language that we believed was fair and, we thought, served the purpose, and we believe it is good law.

I think it is important that it did come out of the committee unanimously. Again, Senator Lott took a real leadership role, and Senator Stevens was involved and Senator Inouye was involved and I was involved. We worked hard to get this done for the committee and for the Senate and for the American people.

As part of all this, we listened to industry complaints. We really did try to go the extra mile with the industry. We even had a hearing held by Chairman Lott on May 4, 2006. We brought in witnesses and allowed moving companies to come in and talk about the situation. Basically, at the conclusion of the hearing, the committee found strong support for our safety provision, including the endorsement of the U.S. DOT inspector general and the FMCSA.

So this has been something that has been vetted, has been agreed to, has been passed by the committee and by the Senate, and it has been signed into law. We think it is a good provision.

Obviously, if there is an amendment on this today, this would not be a technical correction, this would be a big shift in policy. I think that is an important factor for colleagues to consider as they look at this.

Also, if it is offered and if, in fact, I have a chance to come back to the floor and talk about it further, I know there will be a little bit of a comparison to the Consumer Product Safety Act and the Consumer Product Safety Commission bill that we filed a few weeks ago, and we passed it on the Senate floor 79 to 13, I believe it was.

I know there will be a little comparison, but this is very different. This is different in a number of ways. It is similar in some ways, but it is different also. And that is, with a consumer recall and with the State being able to enforce a consumer recall once that decision has been made in Washington, there may be thousands, tens of thousands, possibly millions of units of that product out in the American marketplace that has been recalled. Those products may be in warehouses or they may show up on the Internet. There are a lot of different ways they can show up. It can take literally years to get all those products out of the stream of commerce.

The moving industry is very different than that. Almost always what happens with one of these moving companies is something goes on during the move which more often than not is over a few days' period. Oftentimes, it is from one State to another State. The fact situation here is very different.

One of the reasons we are seeing an increase--and even though we passed this law, we are still seeing a fairly steady increase in these types of complaints--is the proliferation of the Internet. You can get on the Internet right now--I did this yesterday as an experiment. I clicked on something such as ``cheap moving companies.'' I don't know exactly what I typed. Several came up. With many of these companies, what you do is click a couple of little buttons to tell how many rooms you have in the house, or something very rudimentary, and you get a quote.

For folks who know about moving, it takes a lot more than that. You cannot make a couple clicks on the computer and think you are going to get an accurate moving estimate.

My experience has been with these large companies, they have written contracts and they have procedures in place. They come out to your home, or wherever you may be, and they look at your goods. They measure, they offer various services for crating, boxing, and all this kind of jazz. They can look, do their measurements and calculations and give you an estimate down to the penny. More often than not, those estimates are very accurate.

The problem is not so much the name-brand companies. I am sure there are occasional problems with them. But the problem we are trying to get to is these companies that are fly by night, many based on the Internet, many of them you do not know with whom you are dealing.

What we are trying to do is clean up this industry and help the American public in any way we can.

Since we passed this legislation, you would think you would see an amazing drop in statistics. We have seen the numbers grow a little bit. Again, it has been fairly steady. We feel as though we do not have accurate numbers yet. We are actually going to request a GAO study to allow them to do their analysis and see how our provision is working. I think what we will find, once the numbers come in and are analyzed, is some good movement in the right direction.

One point that is important is that under SAFETEA-LU, the FMCSA did not add that many employees. It went from 5 employees to 11 employees. That is still a very small number of employees to do this all over the country. Hopefully, the State attorneys general will be able to help resolve these matters that are very good for the people in their States.

Madam President, I don't know if Senator Bond is going to offer his amendment. He told me earlier he thought he would. I hope he does not. If it does require a vote, certainly I will ask my colleagues to vote against his amendment. If he, in fact, does offer his amendment, I would like to have a chance to respond to Senator Bond. I know Senator Boxer and a few others have indicated their interest in doing that as well.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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