46
Opinion of the Court
charged" can quite naturally be read to mean fees that a State actually collected or charged. The statute thus can easily be read as the ICC chose, making it unlawful "for a State to renounce or modify a reciprocity agreement so as to alter any fee charged or collected as of November 15, 1991, under the predecessor registration system." American Trucking Associations, 9 I. C. C. 2d, at 1194; see Single State Insurance Registration, 9 I. C. C. 2d, at 618-619.
The Michigan Supreme Court held that the language of ISTEA's fee-cap provision compels a different result. Although it acknowledged that ISTEA is silent with respect to reciprocity agreements, the court nonetheless concluded that the fee-cap provision mandates that those agreements have no bearing in the determination of what fee a State "collected or charged" as of November 15, 1991. Yellow Freight System III, 464 Mich., at 31, 627 N. W. 2d, at 241. The court reasoned that the Single State Registration System was "based not on the fees collected from one individual company, but on the fee system that the state had in place." Ibid. (emphasis added). While such a reading might be reasonable, nothing in the statute compels that particular result.
The fee-cap provision refers not to a "fee system," but to the "fee . . . collected or charged. " 49 U. S. C. § 14504(c)(2)(B)(iv)(III). Under the ICC's rule, where a State waives its registration fee, its "fee . . . collected or charged" is zero and must remain zero. The ICC's interpretation is a permissible reading of the language of the statute. And, because there is statutory ambiguity and the agency's interpretation is reasonable, its interpretation must receive deference. See Chevron, supra, at 843.
As commenters to the ICC during the rulemaking pointed out, to allow States to disavow their reciprocity agreements so as to alter any fee charged or collected as of November 15, 1991, would potentially permit States to increase their revenues substantially under the new system, a result that the ICC quite reasonably believed Congress did not intend.
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