Quote:

SF Chronicle
Rejecting a 2015 state law, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday that California cannot charge railroads a $45-per-car fee for carrying crude oil, gasoline and other hazardous materials into the state to help pay for cleanup costs resulting from environmental accidents.

The fee, part of a companion bill to the state budget, was intended to raise up to $10 million a year to pay for state and local emergency-response programs for spills of hazardous substances. But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said federal law allows states to charge such fees only if they are “fair,” and this fee applies only to railroads and not to trucks, which carry about the same amount of potentially dangerous substances into the state.

“Because the fees authorized by (the state law) favor trucking companies over railroads, they are not ‘fair,’” Judge William Fletcher said in the ruling, which upheld a 2016 decision by a San Francisco federal judge that halted enforcement of the fees.


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[www.sfchronicle.com]