VIDALIA — A bill lobbied for and sponsored by locals recently signed by the governor will allow veterans to take their military transportation training and apply it in the civilian world.

House Bill 1005, sponsored by Rep. Andy Anders, D-Vidalia, allows a skills test waiver for Class A, B and C commercial driver’s licenses for qualified veterans with a military license.

Anders said he introduced the bill at the request of Miss-Lou Veterans Village Director Kenny Rushing, who also works as a veteran’s representative at the WIN Job Center. Anders said the Louisiana State Police also approached him in support of the bill.

“We had these veterans coming back, they were having to go through training and testing for (commercial) licenses, and they had just done all of this in Iraq or Afghanistan,” Anders said.

“They already knew how to do it, but they were having to go get trained again.”

Rushing said approximately 20 percent of the veterans he sees at the WIN Job Center are from Louisiana, and he had noted those associated with the Louisiana National Guard were members of transportation units.

“You’ve also got active duty military folks coming home, and if you’ve ever been on a military base, you know they have got supply and fuel trucks — they can’t run without truck drivers,” Rushing said. “These guys have extensive training in the military to be truck drivers, to handle hazardous materials and to haul freight from anywhere.”

A federal law already on the books allows states to waive the training requirements for veterans, and Rushing said the law Louisiana adopted was based in part on a similar one used in Wisconsin.

“For veterans, this provides real value to your training,” he said. “They can come back and get that civilian driver’s license and start looking for employment as a truck driver right away.”

Waiving civilian certification for those trained in the military also helps with a more efficient use of GI bill money, Rushing said.

“They already have the knowledge, skills and ability, but when they get home they find an obstacle and say, ‘I must need to go back to school,’ and they use their GI benefits to get certified in the civilian equivalent,” he said. “But you only get 42 months of GI benefits, and if they have to use half of that to get certified in a field in which they are already trained, it kind of takes away the benefit of GI benefits.”

Rushing said in the coming years he would like both the Louisiana and Mississippi legislatures to look at similar measures for veterans with training in such areas as heating and air-conditioning systems, electrical systems and aviation.

The new law is effective Aug. 1.