Rhode Island’s truck tolling system, which has been on the shelf following a lower court ruling in 2022, has new life following a Court of Appeals decision handed down Friday.
The decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals is a blow to the American Trucking Associations, which has led the legal fight against the tolling plan known as RhodeWorks, does not give a full green light to all the provisions of the Rhode Island law. In that sense, the decision is a partial victory for the ATA.
In the latest finding, the Court found that applying the tolls on bridges only to tractor trailers was not a violation of the dormant Commerce Clause. An earlier plan to have the tolls apply to class 6,7 and 8 vehicles ultimately was revised to include only class 8 vehicles.
However, it did find that the capping of tolls–in which a truck can be assessed only a certain number of tolls in a day for various activities–did violate the dormant Commerce Clause. But the court also found that the capping provision could be “severed” from the law, so that the ruling against the caps does not lead to the entire law being invalidated.
The state’s truck toll was applied only to intrastate bridges, so no bridges crossing into another state were affected. The number of bridges that fell under the law: 13.
ATA and several other companies filed the original lawsuit in 2018. One of the initial plaintiffs was LTL carrier New England Motor Freight; it went out of business in 2019. Among the other plaintiffs is Cumberland Farms, a major New England convenience store chain, and M&M Transport, a dedicated carrier that last year was acquired by Schneider National (NYSE: SNDR).
The First Circuit’s decision handed down in early December comes more than 14 months after oral arguments in the case.
Rhode Island’s request to have the case dismissed was backed in federal District Court in 2019 but a 2022 decision saw the ATA prevail in its fight against the law, which was blocked by Judge William Smith in Rhode Island federal District Court.
At issue is the relationship between the law and the dormant Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
In the 2022 decision, the federal district court said a toll system can be set up to comply with the clause. But it also said at the that time that RhodeWorks, the name of the tolling system that was designed to raise funds for bridge repair and maintenance, “fails to fairly apportion its tolls among bridge users based on a fair approximation of their use of the bridges, was enacted with a discriminatory purpose and is discriminatory in effect. The statute’s tolling regime is unconstitutional under the dormant Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution.”
It was that finding that was reversed Friday.
Citing legal precedent, the Court of Appeals said a tolling system can be justified under the dormant Commerce Clause “if it is based on some fair approximation of the tolled facility, is not excessive in relation to the government benefits conferred, and does not discriminate against interstate commerce.”
There are numerous definitions of the dormant Commerce Clause. The Constitutional Law Reporter website said that the clause, which is not explicit in the Constitution, “automatically invalidates a protectionist state law, whether or not the federal government has legislated on the issue.”
“Our analysis of RhodeWorks revolves around two questions,” the court wrote. “First, does the statue discriminate against interstate commerce? And second, is the burden imposed by the tolls based on some fair approximation of use of Rhode Island bridges?”
The charge of discrimination was rooted in the fact that RhodeWorks only applies to class 8 vehicles. After discussion of some theoretical comparisons in other fields, the court comes back to the question of how similar class 8 vehicles are to the other universe of trucks that wouldn’t come under RhodeWorks.
The conclusion was succinct. Citing earlier language in the prior decisions, the Court of Appeals said “there is simply ‘no concrete evidence demonstrating an increase in Rhode Island-based companies’ use of un-tolled trucks, changes in vehicles fleets, diversion or any other data demonstrating that smaller trucks compete in the same market as tractor trailers.”
ATA, the court said, “offers no actual evidence that tractor-trailers compete with single-unit trucks in Rhode Island, let alone that out-of-state tractor-trailers compete with in-state single-unit trucks in Rhode Island.”
Challenging a “neutral” status under the dormant Commerce Clause, the Court of Appeals said, “must have a substantial competitive interest on nonstate interests.”
“The record provides insufficient support for ATA’s contention that exempting all single-unit trucks from RhodeWorks tolling structure transgresses the dormant Commerce Clause,” the court said.
The caps in RhodeWorks are three-pronged. A truck only gets billed for one-way on a bridge; a ride between Connecticut and Massachusetts with the Ocean State in-between will not cost more than $20 (though a lower court said at current rates, racking up that much was mathematically impossible); and total payments per day max out at $40.
The way the caps are structured, the Court of Appeals found, would mean that local companies would “disproportionately benefit” from the caps compared to out-of-state trucks. It cited ATA submissions that in a certain observed period, 39.9% of the reduction in tolls brought on by the caps were accrued by Rhode Island trucks, even though they only accounted for 18.6% of the toll transactions.
“Given this disparate impact on similarly situated tractor-trailers, the caps are discriminatory,” the court wrote, citing precedents in other cases. “No basis exists for treating this discrimination as permissible.”
Another issue tackled by the Court of Appeals was that of “fair approximation.” It deals with the question of whether the tolls are correlated with the class 8 vehicles’ use and impact on the 13 bridges.
Citing a precedent involving airport user fees, the Court of Appeals said Rhode Island “may collect a fee from the most intensive users without having to also collect a fee from lesser users. Rhode Island can reasonably point to a benefit from deciding to apply its toll to only tractor-trailers rather than to all the varied and much more numerous vehicles that cross its bridges.”
On page 28 of the 52-page decision, the Court then declares “we are not quite done” as it tackles the issue of whether rendering the caps in violation of the dormant Commerce Clause invalidates the entire law. The finding: it doesn’t.
“Invalidating RhodeWorks based on nothing more than the unconstitutionality of the caps would cut against the legislature’s resolve to raise funds for its bridges,” the Court wrote. It does not eliminate the state’s “stated preference” to be able to “excise…defective provisions.”
The decision remands the case back to the lower court.
An email sent to the ATA had not been responded to by publication time. The organization’s website had not posted a reaction to the decision as of early Sunday.
In a prepared statement, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said his office “(had) been confident that this will be the eventual outcome, and we are grateful for the First Circuit’s well-reasoned decision in this case.”
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