Recent action taken by a key Oregon regulatory agency tightened the state’s ties to California’s battered Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule, though it comes just two months after Oregon had put most enforcement of its own version of ACT on hold.
It’s yet another step in the fallout from the Congressional and Presidential actions earlier this year to revoke the Environmental Protection Agency waivers that had given a green light for California to implement the ACT, which mandated a growing percentage of truck sales be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) and the Omnibus NOx rule, which limits emissions of nitrogen oxide from heavy-duty vehicles.
But even Jana Jarvis, the president of the Oregon Trucking Association, said the vote last week by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality left her “confused.”
“By the time the meeting was over, I heard from other press saying, why did they do that?” Jarvis said in a phone interview with FreightWaves.
The actual rule posted by DEQ that was voted on last week–a state spokeswoman referred to it as a state agency rule–has references to numerous sections in the Oregon rule and their tie to a corresponding California rule, along with the date when the California regulation took effect. It substitutes “Oregon” for “California” in the regulations copied by the former from the latter, and swaps out the name of California’s regulatory bodies for those of the Beaver State.
“The adopted amendments harmonize the already existing rules, originally adopted in 2021, with recent amendments made by California,” an Oregon spokeswoman said in an email to FreightWaves. “This action maintains rules that are identical to California.”
Court challenge to the CRA action
The vote continues the tie between Oregon and California. But it does so in the wake of the Congress’ action under the Congressional Review Act to withdraw the ACT and NOx waiver, an action California and other states already are challenging in court.
In the meantime, there is no enforcement mechanism available to California. And that means there effectively is no enforcement mechanism available to the 16 states that have taken steps to follow California’s lead in the adoption of environmental rules.
The delay of ACT enforcement Oregon put in place came in May.
Leah Feldon, the director of the DEP, published a memo May 15 spelling out the “limited enforcement discretion” and “no penalty justification” for OEMs not complying with the state’s ACT for sales of trucks in the 2025 and 2026 model years.
When the memo came down, the Congressional action and Presidential approval had not fully gone through the process but was well underway.
Dealers were pulling back
More pressing, Feldon’s memo came not long after a brewing squeeze on supplies of new trucks that found Oregon as ground zero but with the prospect of it spreading to other states that had adopted California’s ACT guidelines. It got bad enough that Daimler Truck North America, which coincidentally is based in Portland, Oregon, formally halted sales of new trucks into the state. It lifted the ban quickly.
“While manufacturers were involved in developing the ACT framework, they now indicate that ACT requirements are too difficult to meet,” Feldon said in the May memo. “Some manufacturers are limiting new internal combustion engine truck sales as a means to ensure compliance with ACT sales requirements, thereby reducing overall new truck availability to a wide range of users.”
She also cited the “significant uncertainty” surrounding a wide range of supporting infrastructure likely needed to allow the ACT to succeed, including ZEV incentives, investments into charging facilities and the impact of tariffs.
But another significant problem was that the series of credits and debits that were designed to spur compliance with the ACT. The program generates deficits from sales of internal combustion engine vehicles and credits when zero emission vehicles are sold.
The ACT’s requirement for OEMs to sell a rising percentage of ZEVs of medium to heavy duty trucks into a state was paired with the Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule, which put a companion mandate on fleets to buy them.
But with the ACF rule–which Oregon and other states also agreed to adopt–being effectively withdrawn just before the Trump administration took office, OEMs worried that they would not find a market for the ZEVs they were required to sell into states that adopted the ACT, which was either dead or at least put on the shelf while waiting for a court decision. Meanwhile, sales of ICE trucks would be generating deficits that could be difficult to overcome if the ACT rule ever came back in the state.
Or as Feldon put it in her May memo: “The new truck market dynamics in Oregon are not functioning property. In particular, the preferred compliance strategy of manufacturers not delivering internal combustion engine trucks to Oregon’s market to avoid accruing any deficits is failing to meet the needs of dealers and fleets.”
The “current lack of available vehicles,” combined with what was going on at the time with the federal government, was “creating more urgency than the current rulemaking timeline can accommodate,” Feldon wrote.
Several pro-ACT states have put it on hold
Oregon’s actions in May mimicked those of several other states. Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed a similar non-enforcement executive order in early April. So did Massachusetts. Vermont’s non-enforcement executive order came down in May, like that of Oregon.
Despite the no enforcement memo, Oregon’s DEQ still sees itself as implementing the rule as it can. “Oregon DEQ will continue to implement the Advanced Clean Trucks Rule throughout the duration of enforcement discretion for model years 2025 and 2026,” she said in an email to FreightWaves. “The intent of this enforcement discretion directive is to provide temporary relief to manufacturers facing challenges in meeting zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) sales targets.”
The earlier decision by OEMs to restrict sales into the state is not ongoing, she said: “Initial reports to DEQ indicate that this artificial restriction on truck sales in Oregon is over.”
Jarvis said she also sees sales returning to normal. “I have a handful of members that have placed some orders and are anticipating receiving delivery of them this fall,” she said.
Looming in the background for the states that have chosen to follow California’s lead are its lawsuit against the Congressional action reversing the EPA waiver that allowed the ACT and the Nox rule to go into effect, and the question of the Clean Truck Partnership that theoretically tied the hands of OEMs to adopt California NOx rule, which no longer has a waiver to allow it to proceed.
Jarvis, in discussing the uncertainty surrounding the ACT (which now gets a break for probably 18 months), raised a criticism that has heard often: the rule for now could be having a negative environmental impact.
“It’s better to replace the older dirty diesel trucks with new clean diesel,” she said. But if sales of new vehicles are slowing because of a lack of clarity with the ACT, Jarvis added, “I don’t think we were accomplishing our objectives with this particular strategy.”
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