With the March 6 deadline approaching for California to revoke some 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs that had been improperly issued, a California state court has reportedly ordered the state to allow those drivers to keep their licenses.
CalMatters reported that the Alameda County Superior Court issued a tentative ruling Wednesday, Feb. 25, in the lawsuit against the state brought by the Sikh Coalition and Asian Law Caucus.
That ruling, however, puts California between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The Department of Transportation has threatened to withhold up to $160 million in federal highway funding for the state if it doesn't comply with revoking all improperly issued non-domiciled CDLs, also potentially risking the decertification of its CDL program as a whole.
Barbara Horne-Petersdorf, an attorney with the California Department of Justice, told CalMatters that forcing the state to let the 17,000 drivers keep their non-domiciled CDLs “will risk the ultimate harm that California is trying to avoid,” adding that the California DMV “is not insulated from any retaliatory action.”
The Western States Trucking Association said in a Facebook post that "while a federal judge refused to do this, a state judge has just stepped into it and now the California state judicial system is putting California's entire CDL program at risk. Feds can and likely would decertify the state's CDL program if this is not quickly resolved."
The California DMV declined to comment, as it cannot comment on ongoing litigation.
As reported earlier this month, though, advocacy groups want California to defy federal orders and continue issuing non-domiciled CDLs and not revoke the 17,000 that were improperly issued.
FMCSA in its February Final Rule said that it needed to ban non-domiciled CDLs for all but a few small categories of business visa holders because it had "identified an unacceptable bifurcated standard in driver vetting" that required domestic CDL applicants to "face rigorous driver history checks through the Commercial Driver’s License Information System (CDLIS) and the Problem Driver Pointer System (PDPS)," but that did not similarly require a check of driving history of non-domiciled applicants.
Yet Fateh Singh with the Freedom Drivers group told Overdrive earlier this month that California should stand up for the "fundamental rights" of the 17,000 non-citizen drivers facing a loss of their CDL on March 6 -- even if it costs California $160 million and its ability to issue CDLs altogether.
On Feb. 26, owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan and other petitioners, who were successful in halting initial implementation of FMCSA's Interim Final Rule restricting non-domiciled CDL eligibility in November, again petitioned a federal appeals court for an emergency stay of the revised Final Rule, pending judicial review.
[Related: Non-domiciled CDL drivers, advocates call for California, Pennsylvania to fight DOT]
