The administrating entity overseeing a new chassis pool that covers major Southeast seaports has laid the hammer down on unregistered trucking companies.
Consolidated Chassis Management (CCM) plans to charge a steep fee to any companies that use equipment without prior registering for the pool.
While past iterations of the South Atlantic Chassis Pool (SACP) required drayage operators to register, CCM rarely invoiced charges to those who failed to do so.
However, the third time is the charm—or for inattentive trucking companies—the harm.
SACP 3.0 will begin in fiscal Q4 2023. CCM is now urging motor carriers (trucking companies) to register to its onboarding portal before October 1.
This time around, failure to register will result in “service disruption and chassis penalty use charges”.
A $100 penalty for the unregistered
The chassis pool will cover Southeast seaports, including Jacksonville, Savannah, and Wilmington, while also inland locations in Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, and Tampa.
By the time October rolls around, CCM will charge $100 per day to unregistered companies picking up equipment from the SACP.
In other words, the administrator won’t deny truck drivers at its gates, but will extend these penalties should they proceed to lease equipment without their company being registered.
Shippers and carriers can both register
For companies looking to register, required details include providing the company name, U.S. DOT number, Uniform Intermodal Interchange Agreement status, contact information for the billable party, and an estimate of the number of chassis used annually.
CCM advises shippers to get ahold of their drayage providers to check if they are complying before SACP 3.0 launches in October.
If things are looking murky with the middleman, CCM also adds that shippers may also register directly with the new chassis pool.
In theory, if a shipper has enough volume to leverage lower rates and prefers to control the payment, CCM is more than willing to accommodate this arrangement.
A new (cheaper) pricing structure
Aside from the announced penalties, SACP 3.0 will also roll out an updated pricing structure for equipment usage.
CCM will use a five-tier fee system based on the number of usage days for a given client yearly.
For customers with less than 100,000 usage days per year, the lowest usage tier, CCM will charge $22 per chassis per day. For customers with more than 500,000 chassis usage days, the daily rate will drop to $12 per day.
Each of the five tiers is cheaper than the pricing structure in the second iteration of SACP, still in effect until October 1.
Chassis pool threequel was decided early last year
The decision to reconfigure the existing chassis pool and usher in SACP 3.0 came all the way back in February 2022.
That’s when the Ocean Carrier Equipment Management Association and three Southeast port authorities—Georgia Ports, North Carolina State Ports, and Jacksonville Port—reached a deal to transition to a third iteration.
Not included in the agreement was the Port of Charleston, which announced before the deal that it’d be leaving the existing pool and starting its own operation in 2023.
At the time of the agreement, chassis availability was in dire straits. Much of the motivation to reconfigure the equipment pool came from insufficient capacity to meet rising cargo volumes.
While this issue has cooled down since then, SACP 3.0 is lauded by the involved parties as a more resilient system for equipment access going forward.
Just be sure to register.
Final Thoughts
Before the implementation of chassis pools, shipping lines had their own chassis to equip onto their own containers. Naturally, this led to a variety of operating approaches which could be disjointed.
Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this topic or any others in domestic logistics. In addition, stay up to date with weekly headlines from both trucking and rail via our Road Map newsletter.
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