Joseph Ferrara says cement trucking is inundated by citizen idling complaints

Good afternoon, Chairman Gennaro.

My name is Joseph Ferrara, and I am an owner and president of Aggregate and Cement Trucking.

My son and I own and operate this company.

Prior to this, my family was in the ready mix concrete business for our brothers building materials from 1969 through 2015.

So our business involves delivering cement, which is a raw material as opposed to concrete, to concrete plants and construction sites.

So we go to the same locations every day, multiple deliveries, and we are just getting inundated with these idling violations.

And my question to the enforcement community and the legislators is,

This is, we're in favor of eliminating or minimizing unnecessary idling.

We're all for it.

I just, I have two grandchildren.

I'd love to see them live and healthy long lives.

But if the objective of this legislation

is to minimize or eliminate unnecessary idling.

Most of our violations come from citizen complaints.

We don't have an opportunity to cross-examine them, but they take a video, and it's kind of like, gotcha, and it's a money grab.

So my suggestion...

Is if a citizen is going to take a video, if they want to eliminate unnecessary idling, we have 18 truck drivers.

They make dozens of deliveries a day.

I've instructed them on the law, and you shouldn't idle if you're not pumping off.

But have the citizen tell the driver, hey, do you know you can't do that?

And if they say F you and they take a video of it, but if they stop, they've accomplished their purpose.

Someone on the prior panel talked about how the drivers shut their trucks off when they see them.

But couldn't we make it a requirement if you really want to clean up the air?

Instructor drivers.

They may not

That's the purpose of it.

This has become a multi-million dollar money grab.

And it's not fair to businesses that pay taxes, employ union members.