On a Friday in late February, a major snowstorm had the road crew in Canaan scrambling.

In the haste to get town roads cleared, a town employee who was in the process of obtaining his commercial driver’s license, or CDL, was allowed behind the wheel of a plow truck by himself.

As a trainee, he should have had a CDL holder in the cab with him while he drove. The driver had been following the rules, Town Administrator Mike Samson said, but as the day wore on and the intensity of the storm picked up, the decision was made to allow the driver to work on his own. Canaan was having a tough time filling vacancies and was short two employees in the highway department.

“He had someone with him earlier in the day, but I don’t think he did at that time,” Samson said. “He had been assigned a CDL driver.”

Around 4 p.m. near the intersection of Route 4 and Depot Street, the driver-in-training, who was working in tandem with another plow driver, backed his International 7500 into a 1-ton pickup truck driven by Robert Scott, the town’s road agent, who was plowing a municipal parking lot.

The investigating police officer’s report faulted the weather and said the driver’s lack of CDL license did not contribute to the crash. But she still cited the town employee for operating with an expired license, which also covers drivers who do not have a license “of the appropriate class or type.”

The crash did about $3,000 in damage to the pickup truck, Samson said, and the employee left a short time later “of his own volition” to return to a previous employer.

The frustrating and costly incident in Canaan is an example of the challenges most municipalities are facing as they find themselves without properly licensed drivers to perform critical jobs.

In some cases, smaller vehicles that don’t require a CDL, such as a 1-ton pickup with a plow, might be used as a workaround. But a pickup can’t carry the sand, salt or soil needed to repair a culvert or add traction on black ice. Municipal offices have struggled to complete highway projects and keep the snow plowed during heavy winter storms without a full roster of drivers.

Drivers, meanwhile, have their pick of jobs throughout the Upper Valley, and demand doesn’t show signs of waning, according to Todd West, owner of Northeast Driver Training in Chester, Vt.

“I’ve got trucking companies from Greenfield (Mass.) to well beyond the Upper Valley calling me looking for drivers,” West said.

The shortage and competition between employers is driving up wages.

West said that right now he has companies looking for 50 drivers. He said one employer called and said he’d take five today if he could find them.

Nationwide, the shortage of CDL drivers sits at about 80,000, and it’s expected to increase to around 250,000 in the next decade or so.

The pipeline of drivers

One of the private sector companies competing for drivers is Casella Waste Management, which has started its own CDL training school and is a federally recognized training center.

Bill Baptie, who was manager in White River Junction for 13 years, is the training manager for Casella and one of two instructors at his school in Rutland, which offers classes for two to nine students at a time.

Baptie said students come from all over the Casella footprint — from Maine to New York to Pennsylvania — to Rutland, where Casella has teamed up with Stafford Technical Center.

Students are housed, fed and graduated in two weeks, with an appointment waiting for them at the Department of Motor Vehicles after their training is complete. And the students won’t even have to worry about the cost, which Casella values at $5,000. Baptie said Casella waives the cost and the employees get paid during the training, albeit at a lower wage, and then get bumped up once they acquire a license.

National statistics show most students will be male and 18-21 years of age. Only about 7% of CDLs are issued to women. But driving jobs — many with decent pay and steady availability — are not as popular as they once were, with more drivers leaving than there are new drivers entering the field.

With little in the way of educational requirements, a CDL driver can start out earning more than $50,000 in the Upper Valley.

West said his school charges $6,800 for a five-week course, but drivers can quickly recoup their expenses.

“I don’t know why — with the kind of money you can make — I don’t know why there aren’t more people lining up,” West said.

The public sector

Several jobs advertised in recent weeks by Upper Valley construction companies and other industries have offered $30 per hour for CDL drivers.

Those kinds of wages make it difficult for the public sector — including many Upper Valley municipalities — to compete for badly needed drivers. Hemmed in by voter-approved budgets and limited in their ability to match sign-on bonuses offered by many private companies, town managers and highway department bosses have seen the impact of driver shortages.

The problem is particularly acute in Lebanon, which is short 10 CDL drivers, according to City Manager Shawn Mulholland, who recently listed the impacts on the city’s Department of Public Works.

“We are struggling to meet the daily requirements of our operations,” he said. “That’s a problem for us. It puts a crunch in our ability to meet our daily service requirements.”

CDL positions are a year-round need, Mullholland said, but winter plowing is the biggest challenge because when a big storm hits, drivers are needed 24 hours, requiring two CDL drivers for each plow.

“Because the trucks run around the clock when we have back-to-back snowstorms, it’s a pretty critical issue for us,” Mulholland said. “We struggled last winter with plowing roads, and the winter before that as well. The situation hasn’t gotten any better.”

But it’s not just winter plow routes that get short shrift when CDL positions go unfilled.

Mulholland said about 39 positions across Department of Public Works require a CDL — including at the solid waste facility, water and sewer, operations and maintenance, and the airport.

He said the situation at the landfill was so bad, the city had to close some days.

“I don’t have enough staffing to keep the landfill open on a Saturday of Memorial Day weekend,” Mulholland said.

Lebanon pays its CDL drivers between $20.72 and $24.71 per hour, which Mulholland said is better than average for the area.

“We just did a market study and the data shows that at least compared to other communities, we’re above average,” he said. “We’re paying above the average at the 75th percentile.”

Mulholland said the city offers perks that he hopes will make the jobs more attractive than some private sector positions.

“We have better benefits than those other jobs do,” Mulholland said, mentioning health insurance, dental insurance, a pension plan and others. “You balance that out.”

Still, Mulholland acknowledged the city would have to adjust its pay scale for drivers.

“We’ll be taking steps to increase the upper range for those positions,” Mulholland said. “We’re going through that process right now. Obviously we need to be able to compete, so we’ll be making changes.”

Across the river, Hartford Town Manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis also said the lack of flexibility to raise pay or offer sign-on bonuses hampers the town’s effort to recruit qualified drivers.

“We know that they’re in high demand, but we don’t have the flexibility to just do whatever it takes to get people in the door to work for us because we do have budget constraints,” Yarlott-Davis said. “It means that they have to be really nimble. We need to be really cognizant of who can do what, when, where and how.”

Yarlott-Davis said that with such a short list of CDL holders currently on the payroll, it’s critical the town start planning now for next winter because plow routes have to be covered to keep the roads safe.

She said she hopes future budget discussions will include considerations about market forces, but she said it’s not as easy as just bumping up the pay for the CDL drivers. Municipal officials have to be cognizant of how increasing pay for one set of workers will ripple through the rest of the department.

“We can’t just change the highway equipment operators,” she said. “We need to look at our highway foreman, we need to look at the person that supervises that person. When you change one pay scale, you need to actually look holistically at the entire house, almost, at that point.”

Obtaining a CDL

All states are required to meet federal standards for commercial driver’s licenses under the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which sets the minimum standards.

Under the federal act, a driver is required to have a Class B CDL to drive a vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating, or GVWR, of more than 26,000 pounds.

A Class A CDL is required when driving a vehicle that is 26,000 pounds GVWR and towing a trailer that is more than 10,000 pounds GVWR.

That means a person driving a large dump truck would need a Class B license, but to pull a trailer with a backhoe on it, that driver would then need a Class A license. Both levels are in high demand.

Other reasons a CDL would be required include a vehicle transporting hazardous materials or driving a vehicle carrying 16 or more passengers, including the driver.

Drivers generally can transfer a CDL from one state to another. To obtain a CDL under federal regulations, a driver has to pass both a Department of Transportation physical — including a vision test — and drug screening,

The drug screening is where some applicants get tripped up, especially as laws around marijuana use have changed.

Vermont has legalized recreational use of cannabis and is scheduled to allow retail sales later this year. In New Hampshire, possession of small amounts of marijuana has been decriminalized, and its other neighbors — Maine, Massachusetts and Quebec — already allow retail marijuana sales.

Meanwhile, the drug is still forbidden under federal law and testing positive for THC, the psychoactive compound in cannabis, will cause an applicant for a CDL to fail the drug screening.

West said he’s had people inquire about his school and then declare, “I’m not giving up smoking pot.”

The requirements in both Vermont and New Hampshire are guided by federal law and include being at least 18 years old and having a valid state driver’s license. At 18, a driver can only operate inside the state’s borders. A commercial driver has to be 21 to cross state lines, which can prove challenging for Upper Valley companies.

A recent change to federal law requires drivers qualifying for a CDL to attend a federally approved entry-level driver training school. That training must be completed before a driver can apply for a skills test with a state licensing agency.

Previously, a driver could be trained by anybody — for example a family member or co-worker — the way a parent might teach a child to drive the family car.

But a February rule change says training must be from a federally recognized training center.

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