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If a proposed highway improvement project has passed every environmental test required by the federal government once — a necessary yet very expensive process that takes many months, even years, to complete — should it have to go through the same process over and over again?

Shipments of trailers and chassis continue to drop off their pace of 1998, when they broke the previous record set three years earlier. April figures slipped 2.3% from the previous month, according to a preliminary count from the U.S. Bureau of Census. Complete trailers and chassis totaled 23,361 for April vs. 23,905 for March, indicating the downward trend that started off the year has not let up.

Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa placed Local 19 in Grapevine, Texas, under control of the International union, following the resignation of local president J.D. Potter. Hoffa named Joe Darmento, a 10-year Teamster veteran from Louisville, Ky., to serve as trustee on an interim basis. Local 19 has about 3,500 members in four states, most of whom work in airline-related industries.

A traffic manager for a New Jersey mail-order company pleaded guilty to pocketing more than $74,000 in kickbacks and hiding the income from the Internal Revenue Service. William Surdakowski pleaded guilty June 14 to failing to report $74,889 in taxable income that he received in 1994 for awarding business to an unidentified trucking company in Virginia.

Three weeks into the division of Conrail between Norfolk Southern and CSX railroads, incompatible computer systems have caused so many problems that United Parcel Service, their biggest intermodal customer, has pulled 50% of its traffic off both railroads and put it back on the highways.

Don’t look for a negotiated rulemaking on hours of service. Prospects for reforming driver hours by general consensus withered when the Transportation Department released a report June 10 that recommended against trying to bring interested parties around the table to work out a new regulation.

American Trucking Associations doesn’t plan to actively lobby for passage of legislation allowing states to increase maximum truck weights to 97,000 pounds. Instead, the organization’s board of directors was expected to vote June 18 to create a productivity task force to examine truck size and weight as part of a big-picture look at ways to improve efficiency in trucking.

The national average price of diesel fuel bounced to $1.068 per gallon, rising nine-tenths of a cent from the previous week’s average of $1.059 and reversing a four-week slide. The increase was driven in large measure by a 5-cents-a-gallon increase in California.

Political clout and policy discussions were the main attractions at American Trucking Associations’ Summer Leadership Meeting, which featured appearances from top lawmakers, reporters and regulators.