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How did the Conestoga’s legal troubles start?

In 1998, The Conestoga was really starting to take off. One of our big customers, out in Iowa, bought 100 of them, and the tarps were in use all over the Midwest. Then one day a customer called and told me that the Indiana State Police were ticketing their Conestoga trailers for being too wide. The legal limit on a trailer is 102 inches, and every tarp system that’s put on any kind of trailer is going to extend over that. In the case of Conestoga, it was three inches on each side. The police measured the trailer, and it was 108 inches wide, which is six inches wider than allowed.

So we got involved and invited the head of the Indiana State Police to our Indianapolis plant. We explained what the product was and the history of other types of tarp systems, such as roll tarps, which also extend three inches on each side. They’re just not as obvious, and there was this sort of informal understanding that three inches per side was kind of a rule of thumb that was accepted, but never codified.

Is it also true that the Conestoga was safer for drivers?

Yes. It’s safer for drivers to not have to climb up on trailers to cover and uncover loads, and that’s ultimately what turned things to our side: the safety issue for drivers. With the Conestoga, they could cover their load with their feet on the ground. It was much safer.

What was going on in other states

We started a dialogue with the departments of transportation (DOT) and state police in every state, starting with Frankfort, Kentucky; Springfield, Illinois; and Madison, Wisconsin.

Kentucky was fairly reasonable, and Wisconsin was fairly reasonable. But they all said: Whatever Illinois decides, that’s the direction we’re going. We got a meeting with the state of Illinois, and customers from Michigan and Indiana volunteered to drive units down to Springfield, Illinois, for a meeting.

We pulled those two trailers into the lot right behind each other and opened them up. About 100 people poured out of the building and crawled all over those trailers. I was on the ground answering questions. The state police and DOT officials were yelling at the top of their lungs down from the trailer. They said, “These are illegal, and we’re going to get them out of the state.”

Meanwhile, my two lawyers huddled up with two people under a big apple tree. I walked over to them, and those two people turned out to be the head of Illinois’ DOT and the head of the Illinois State Police. They were going back and forth because there was no clear federal rule. My lawyer got them to agree that if we could get the federal DOT to approve it, then Illinois would accept that decision. Now, we had to go to Washington, DC, and hook up with the federal USDOT (United States Department of Transportation).

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How did things go in Washington?

Before the trip to Washington, I tried to find the channels to contact the USDOT. Meanwhile, my lawyer contacted our senators and congressmen. At that time, our congresswoman here in Indianapolis was Julia Carson. We started engaging with her, and she sent one of her staffers over. They toured the plant, and we showed them the product. We showed them what we were doing and how many jobs we had there.

Basically, we said, “If this product is killed, all these jobs are gone.” She went to bat for us real fast. She found a contact at the USDOT, and we started the conversation with them. They agreed to look at our units. The same two companies from before drove those trailers all the way out to the Baltimore airport. We parked them on the airport grounds, and about 20 people from the USDOT came out and looked over the units.

The USDOT leader said that they liked our product, and they thought it looked a lot safer than people climbing up on a truck to tarp their loads. They wrote us a letter stating that the Conestoga fit the criteria for being on the highway for safety reasons.

Well, we sent that letter to the Illinois DOT, and they rejected it out of hand. They said that they still didn’t like it and were not going to honor the federal DOT. That started another scramble.

How did you manage the Illinois situation?

I called around to our customers in Illinois, and we found one who was a personal friend of the state senator from mid-state Illinois. He agreed to meet with us at the Illinois Statehouse with the state DOT and state police to act as a referee. And so, 20 days before the end of that year, we met them at the Statehouse. They were not in session, and the guy drove up from his home to meet us. We’re sitting in this guy’s office with my two lawyers and me on one side of the desk; the Illinois DOT and the state police on the other side were having a discussion. The Illinois DOT just did not want this. We were going back and forth for about an hour and didn’t come to a resolution. We were informed that Conestogas would be barred January 1st, 1999. We had 3 weeks.

My lawyer figured out that it was not going our way. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a one-inch-thick document. He said to the head of Illinois DOT, “Do you have your own counsel or do I need to give this to the Illinois Attorney General?”

It was a federal injunction filing, but we didn’t file it just yet. My lawyer said we needed to try a legislative angle — to go to the governor. So we hired a lobbyist.

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What happened once the lobbyist got involved?

Just before Christmas, the head of state police calls me up and says, “Jim, this is the state police in Illinois. I don’t know who you know, but you can run your Conestoga.”

I said, “Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.”

I called up our attorney and said, “I just got a call from the state police. They’re going to OK it. What happened?”

He said, “I don’t know. Let me find out.”

He called me back a few hours later and told me the story. “If you want to get something done in the legislature, you have to hire the top lobbyists, and in every state, the top lobbyists are the ones that handle the cigarette companies,” he said. “We hired that guy.”

How did your lawyer manage that?

He knew who to call. And the lobbyist got in touch with leaders at OSHA and the Department of Commerce in Illinois. The feds had decided the Conestoga was a safety product, so OSHA was interested. Since the Illinois DOT was driving fleets out of the state with their rules, the Illinois Department of Commerce was really interested in saving Illinois businesses.

The two of them teamed up on the Illinois DOT guy and got him to relent. It was amazing. After that, we had Illinois, Iowa, Oregon, South Dakota and a couple other states. They all relented.

It seemed like you were in the clear. But was that actually the case?

Well, there’s one more story. The state of Arkansas called, and they were impounding trailers at the Mississippi River. We started up again and found a lawyer in Little Rock. We flew down there and met with the state police and the DOT.

The head of the Arkansas State Police reminded me of Jackie Gleason’s sheriff character in “Smokey and the Bandit.” He was short, rotund, had a state trooper hat on and a long cigar. He said, “Boy, we ain’t gonna allow these Coneestogees (sic) in this here state.”

My lawyer filed an injunction immediately. We returned to Indiana, and the next day I got a call from the federal DOT. This was the guy who was helping usher this whole thing through. He said, “Jim, don’t do it. Don’t file the injunction in Arkansas.”

I said, “How did you hear about that?” He said, “Oh, I know everything that’s going on. We’re going to make a new rule.”

This is back in the year 2000. It had started in 1998, and by now it was the year 2000. “It’s going to take some time. I’ll get Arkansas to back off, but we’re going to make a new ruling that will make these things legal.”

It took two years, but in 2002, the feds came up with a new rule. It was quite a bit more comprehensive, including more than just our system, and it essentially cleared the deck for everyone in the industry.