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CARB seeks authority to collect two freight‑sector fees; decal and enforcement questions raised
Summary
The Air Resources Board requested statutory authority (HSC §39611 addition) to assess fees for transport refrigeration units and commercial harbor craft to fund implementation and enforcement; lawmakers asked about the decal system and administrative costs.
The California Air Resources Board asked the committee for explicit statutory authority to assess and collect fees for two existing regulatory programs: the transport refrigeration unit (TRU) regulation and the commercial harbor craft regulation. CARB representative Rich Boyd said the change would add a Health and Safety Code section to confirm the board’s fee authority for regulation implementation and enforcement; CARB said it is not asking for new or higher fees beyond the amounts already included in regulatory approvals.
CARB explained that legal challenges had interrupted fee collections under prior interpretations. For the TRU program, a district court ruling found the previously cited authority insufficient to support fee collection; CARB has not collected those fees since that ruling. CARB’s proposed trailer language would provide explicit fee authority to allow CARB to collect and allocate the resources needed to implement, monitor and enforce those regulations.
Fee amounts and enforcement details CARB told the committee the decal/fee amounts are modest in scale: the TRU fee was described as about $15 per unit per year (and applied per facility/unit) and the commercial harbor craft fee as roughly $1,300 per vessel per year. CARB said the 2022 regulatory amendments implemented a decal scheme to make compliance visible to enforcement officers in the field; committee members asked whether the decal system is functioning as intended and whether the fee rollout is proportionate to expected compliance and enforcement costs.
LAO and Assembly members asked for additional detail on administrative overhead and whether the statutory fix would tie fees to specific enforcement deliverables. CARB said the proposal does not expand fee authority beyond the two regulations and emphasized the plan to move enforcement funding off general‑purpose accounts and toward a user‑fee model for regulated entities.
No vote was taken; the committee requested follow‑up materials and cost‑allocation detail from CARB and fiscal staff.
