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PHOENIX — As an Arizona highway patrol officer for 14 years in the 1970s and ’80s, Dick Landis chased illegal immigrants, drunken college students, speeding motorists and even hardened drug dealers up and down just about every strip of concrete slicing through the state’s scalding, lonely desert.

An accounting rules shift could trigger fundamental changes in a truck leasing market worth as much as $70 billion by reducing the attractiveness of renting equipment and reducing fleets’ access to debt.

U.S. retail diesel prices jumped sharply last week, a second straight bump that raised the national average a two-week total of 20.4 cents a gallon, or about 10%, as gasoline also rose, topping the $2 a gallon mark for the first time since November, according to the Department of Energy.

Two senior House Democratic leaders last week introduced a sweeping greenhouse gas bill that includes a cap-and-trade program and would expand motor carriers’ use of SmartWay technologies.

Budget committees in Congress have approved draft versions of spending-revenue plans for next year that reject an Obama administration proposal to remove the firewalls that have traditionally protected the Highway Trust Fund and other transportation-related funds.

The Department of Transportation will develop a proposal to reopen the United States to trucks from Mexico before President Obama visits President Felipe Calderon there later this month, a spokeswoman told Transport Topics.

Two regional less-than-truckload carriers announced across-the-board pay cuts because of deteriorating freight volumes and prices, Saia Inc. by 5% for salaried employees and drivers, and Ward Trucking Corp. by 8.9%. Both companies said executives’ pay was cut even more.

An Illinois jury has awarded $23.8 million in damages against leading freight broker C.H. Robinson Worldwide in a dual-fatality 2004 truck accident case involving a motor carrier hired to haul a load of potatoes.

President Obama named two nominees to lead agencies within the Department of Transportation, the White House said.

The U.S. economy’s service sector continued to contract in March, the Institute for Supply Management said Friday.