34 APRIL 2018 • FOGHORN REGULATORYREPORT EASY MANEUVERABILITY Give your passengers a smooth ride with reliable John Deere PowerTech™ propulsion and generator drive engines. With high torque and low-rated rpm, they deliver excellent vessel control and quiet operation. For easy navigation on the water — Nothing Runs Like A Deere™. JohnDeere.com/marine 60 to 559 kW (80 to 750 hp) Vessels designed & built for your business www.armstrongmarine.com | sales@armstrongmarine.com | (360) 457-5752 of the public sector was deficient. The new Subchapter M—the federal regulation of towing vessels is one where there is a choice between direct inspections by the Coast Guard or validation of regulatory compli- ance through third party audits of a company’s towing safety management system (TSMS). The TSMS covers, in part, the compliance with Subchapter M. There are industry sectors like the Great Lakes where industry appears to prefer the direct inspection by the Coast Guard. For those that choose the safety management audit process they fall somewhere between direct Coast Guard inspection and the ACP process, except the auditors may be from one or more of the classification societies that also have their own clas- sification rules. It is not known if those TSMS auditors will deal exclusively with Coast Guard rules for towing vessels or be utilized in other vessel class survey. Not to say that there are not some towing vessels that do comply with class. Here we have a previously unin- spected class of vessels that will have those that are direct inspected by the Coast Guard and those where regu- latory compliance is determined in- directly with the role of third parties. This can be a laboratory to assess the effectiveness and costs of each inspec- tion compliance method. That may be one of the most significant collateral benefits of Subchapter M. The Passenger Vessel Association in the past was concerned that the Coast Guard may not always have the ability or the authority to conduct in- spections of our fleet. At the time, and consistently since then, PVA’s position is to not support an independent third party arrangement for our fleet. When there were ominous signs in the Coast Guard was beginning to lose the capacity and ability to conduct routine inspection activity PVA members set about to develop a voluntary safety management system called Flagship that ideally would have the Coast Guard serve as the auditor. This would preserve the long standing, cooperative and successful relation- ship with our primary regulator, the Coast Guard. Flagship has reached a stage where the Coast Guard has rec- ognized it as a safety magenta system and will use its existence as a factor in determining inspection process under risk based inspection protocols. n