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By David Barnes, Staff Writer

Congress has vacated Washington for the year, leaving behind a slew of legislation for President Clinton to review and sign after his return from the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. If trucking has its way, tops on the president’s to-do list would be signing legislation creating the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

That would get the ball rolling on a host of issues, from selecting the agency’s leadership, to establishing an organizational chart, to such mundane things as creating a new home page for the FMCSA on the World Wide Web.

The existing Office of Motor Carrier Safety is already working behind the scenes to get the infrastructure for the new unit in place. Visitors to the office’s Web site last week may have experienced difficulties in logging in as technicians separated motor carrier safety pages from those belonging to the Federal Highway Administration.

Creating a new agency is no easy task, even though most of the employees needed to open the shop are already ensconced at OMCS. The two biggest issues — other than when the president will sign the legislation — are what the new agency will look like and who will lead it.

Julie Cirillo, the acting head of the trucking safety office, says the new agency will look much like the office did when it was housed within FHWA, except that a layer of bureaucracy will be removed. The new administrator will report directly to the secretary of transportation. In the past, the Office of Motor Carrier Safety was a small unit of the Federal Highway Administration, whose prime mission was maintaining the nation’s highway network, with its leader reporting to the head of FHWA.

Left unanswered is who will head the new agency. There are two schools of thought on the issue.

Some Washington insiders believe Cirillo will remain in place for some time, noting the Clinton administration’s poor track record for filling vacancies in a timely manner. Others believe that Vice President Albert Gore Jr., whose father, former Sen. Albert Gore Sr. (D-Tenn.), was one of the fathers of the Interstate Highway System, will push for the prompt nomination of a high-profile safety advocate.

Vice President Gore is familiar with the concept of a motor carrier administration. He was a member of the Senate Commerce Committee when hearings were held on the issue in the mid-1980s. Being seen as an advocate of safe highways should have some appeal for Gore, who is in the midst of a heated primary campaign for his party’s presidential nomination against former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.).

Gore is not the only one who could benefit from the prompt nomination of a motor carrier administrator. The nominee would be scrutinized by the Senate Commerce Committee, which is chaired by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

So what is going to happen? If the administration decides to go the acting administrator route, Cirillo could be around for a while.

If they want a more politically polished person for the job, Deputy FHWA Administrator Gloria B. Jeff could be tapped as acting administrator. Jeff previously ran FHWA’s policy shop and is former deputy director of the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Urban Transportation Planning. She was DOT’s point person on truck safety when the issue hit the mainstream media early this year.

A possible compromise candidate could be Federal Railroad Administrator Jolene Molitoris. During her seven years at FRA, Molitoris has weathered controversy over rail safety by building consensus between labor and management on a host of controversial rulemakings. The number of railroad-related accidents and injuries has declined during most of her tenure. Molitoris has escaped criticism for ongoing service problems at railroads because economic regulatory oversight is the bailiwick of the Surface Transportation Board.

Of course, all of this is mere speculation until the motor carrier safety bill is signed into law, which the president needs to do quickly to get the ball rolling.