RSF 111, Kentucky CDL Program Outreach

Kentucky seeks funding to establish an outreach effort between the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet’s (KYTC) Division of Driver Licensing (DDL) and other agencies involved in enforcement and adjudication of federal and state laws and regulations pertaining to CDLs. These organizations include the Kentucky State Police-Commercial Vehicle Enforcement (KSP-CVE) Division, the Kentucky County Attorneys Association, the Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts, and the Kentucky Circuit Court Clerks Association to resolve barriers to compliance with CDL program requirements. The Kentucky Transportation Center (KTC) at the University of Kentucky will provide assistance to KYTC in the outreach effort, garner support and cooperation of the stakeholders, provide curriculum, conduct presentations, and solicit feedback regarding the partnership efforts. Each stakeholder faces its own challenges to compliance, but a common one is personnel turnover. A focus of this effort will be to encourage each group to establish the training as an integral part of initial orientation and also to have a formal inclusion in recurrent training, rather than reliance on a presentation at an annual conference or meeting. Prosecutors and judges face considerable pressure to clear their dockets, so diversions that run counter to the CDL masking prohibitions will always be a challenge. Added to that challenge is the situation in Kentucky that the county attorneys can run their own diversion programs which financially benefits their office. Other than diversion programs it is a common practice for judges to reduce and/or merge charges or accept such a recommendation from a prosecutor. In these instances the court costs remain the same and all parties are satisfied with the outcome. This practice can and does influence CDL cases when the judge or prosecutor are not attentive to the CDL case or not in agreement that these cases need to be handled differently. To counter these pressures it is important that the curriculum not only provide the legal requirements, but to include information on the increased injury and fatality risk inherent in commercial vehicle (CMV) crashes and the importance of a reliable record system to removing dangerous drivers from the highways. Circuit Court clerks must also understand their role in the timeliness and accuracy of data to be transmitted to DDL. A challenge to consistency in reporting is that Kentucky’s Circuit clerks are elected officials in each of Kentucky’s 120 counties, and therefore sometimes have different incentives than state agencies. As DDL currently works with the clerks on compliance with the federal and state CDL regulations, specific barriers to data quality and timeliness need to be identified and addressed. III. Performance Objective • Identify liaisons at state and local law enforcement agencies, district judges, county attorneys, and local court records processors to improve Kentucky’s compliance with state and federal CDL laws and regulations. • Work with the KTC research team to develop training materials and curriculum that explain federal and state CDL requirements and the importance of enforcing those requirements. • Provide information to CDL adjudication and enforcement agencies via public presentations, trainings, conferences, continuing legal education, meetings, or other identified opportunities. • Obtain feedback from the audience about project effectiveness and suggested improvements. • Identify measures to help CDL administrators track the success of outreach. Ideally we would like to compare rates of diversions before and after the project, and some measures of change in data quality and timeliness. As it is we will have to state our objective in terms of accomplishing the tasks in the Activity Plan, the establishment of three working groups, development of three training curriculums, presentations and/or training sessions for each of the three groups we hope to impact. Also an objective is to obtain feedback from the audience about project effectiveness and suggested improvements. A goal pertaining to all of these stakeholders is to ensure that both initial and recurrent training on the requirements is provided to all personnel rather than exclusive reliance on a presentation at an annual conference or meeting. Goals pertaining to court clerks and Driver Licensing are to support compliance with timely CDL reporting/data entry and data quality.