ATA Chief Spear Pushes Bold Agenda for Trucking
Chris Spear emphatically making a point in address to ATA members. Photo: Evan Lockridge
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Chris Spear emphatically making a point in address to ATA members. Photo: Evan Lockridge
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LAS VEGAS. In a fast-paced and wide-ranging address, new American Trucking Associations President and CEO Chris Spear introduced himself to ATA members and asserted that under his stewardship, the industry’s biggest lobby will “get in the game” to advance an array of trucking’s interests in Washington D.C. and on the state level.
“The state of our industry is strong, but without leadership, unity or an aggressive pursuit of results, our future is uncertain,” said Spear. He said that’s why ATA is “building a structure, a team and an agenda that not only provides certainty, but results.”
He also gave frank notice to foes of trucking. “If you want to throw the first proverbial punch, you’d better knock us down because you will feel the one we throw back,” Spear said. “ATA will fight your one-line soundbites and baseless rhetoric and we will publicly call out the hidden agendas of other industry groups.”
Spear began his Oct. 3 speech here at the ATA Management Conference & Exposition on a nostalgic note, recounting how he grew up with trucking. He recalled that some of his “best memories growing up” were of rides in the cab when his father “trucked grain from the wheat fields of Nebraska to the silos,” noting that was when he “first realized what it was like to earn a day’s pay.”
Shifting gears, he dived headlong into the sorry state of politics inside the Beltway– and what trucking must do to counteract it. Spear said trucking “cannot be driven by Washington… People’s livelihoods depend on the decisions you make. Unlike [in] Washington, there’s no room in the real world for complacency or incompetence.”
Spear mourned the death of compromise in national politics and explained how that loss has …Read the rest of this story
