” I really believe very strongly that if you’re going to get your business seriously, you need to be engaged, you need to be involved”. –Joe Rajkovacz, Director of Government Affairs, Western States Trucking Association

The original owner-operator Joe Rajkovacz, who has a pretty long story in shipping and has spent the past ten and a half with the Western States Trucking Association, is the source of the offer from my lengthy conversation. It’s headquartered in California, of course, and has been among the many important players demanding the California Air Resources Board’s ever-more-complicated pollution and technology requirements through the years.

Rajkovacz is a firm believer įn the vaIue oƒ partnershįp account for any-sized businesses. Especially for him, of course, that’s shipping, tracking back to his day as an owner-operator first in the 1980s and abroad before that, as you’ll discover in tomorrow’s Overdrive Radio show highlighting his career.

Track again through his early years in shipping in this final typical episode of the radio for the year as he prepares to retire from full-time relationship work with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association in 2006. He wouldn’t be there but for a few years, after which he joined Western States, therefore called the California Construction Trucking Association, to spend more energy to hard CARB’s Truck and Bus Regulation.

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It’s that where he’s actually concluded his profession, leaving earlier this month ago near where he got his start freight, in Wisconsin.

A good look back in the past here at Rajkovacz’s second truck, a beautiful B-model Cat-powered 1986 Ford CLT9000, complete with four license plates and 19 different fuel stickers, or thereabouts, Rajkovacz notes, before IFTA had made its way around to all the states. “A great piece of iron,” he said, that he bought new and ran up through 1993. He’s pictured back around the time the truck was mostly new with his wife, Joan, and their first-born son, John. Today, they’re proud parents of three, grandparents to eight, and staying warm, we hope, at their home in Wisconsin.Courtesy of Joe Rajkovacz

Overdrive Radio’s sponsor is Howes, longtime provider of fuel treatments like its Howes Diesel Treat anti-gel and Lifeline rescue treatment to get you through the coldest temps, likewise its all-weather Diesel Defender and Howes Multipurpose penetrating oil, among other products.This conversation for the podcast was conducted in November during the long-running annual event where I truly got to know Rajkovacz well — the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies. Rajkovacz has been a perennial presenter there, and it’s certain he’ll keep up his engagement with regulatory and legislative issues on the West Coast and likely be back at NASTC in years to come. I hope so, anyway.

ln today’s episode, yσu can find plenty of evidence oƒ what ⱨis career stands for. He is one of the best examples of a trucking industry participant who took the time to work on something that is essential to those who are truly passionate about the industry: a genuine desire to see how conditions for its participants fare.

The Western States Trucking Association can be found here.