February 20, 2005

Trucking bill raises road questions

Measure would allow more heavy loads

By John Cheves And Brandon Ortiz
HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITERS

FRANKFORT - The rural patch of Gallatin County where Elsie Ewbank lives and farms is so bucolic that for years she commuted 40 miles to her job in downtown Cincinnati rather than move.

But Ewbank, who is 60 and now retired, keeps a watchful eye these days on a sand-and-gravel plant down the two-lane road from her home. The company's trucks, thundering past with loads of grit and stone, chew up pavement and create a nuisance in terms of traffic and noise, she said.

"This is a farm-to-market road," Ewbank said last week. "When you change how a road is used, you change the community entirely."

Her worries might be just beginning.

Road builders and other companies that haul heavy cargo in Kentucky are pushing hard behind the scenes in Frankfort for legislation that would let them use trucks with 50-percent larger payloads than the ones annoying Ewbank.

Currently, only coal trucks are allowed to ignore the 40-ton weight limit on state roads, by purchasing permits letting them run loads of up to 60 tons.

However, if House Bill 8 becomes law, those massive rigs -- loathed by many Eastern Kentucky motorists -- would be joined around the state by similar trucks carrying other natural resources, including sand, gravel, rock, oil and natural gas.

The bill barely cleared the House Transportation Committee on Feb. 10. Since then, lobbyists for the companies that would benefit have ramped up their campaign in anticipation of a full House vote, possibly this week.

Politically powerful road builders, who give hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations, are leading the charge. They win huge state contracts to repair the roads damaged by, among other things, legally overweight trucks. They also carry tons of gravel in their own trucks.

Last week, the bill's sponsor took the fight into the traditionally off-limits and non-partisan offices of the legislature's research staff.

Faced with a potentially fatal staff analysis of his measure, Rep. Howard Cornett challenged the validity of its "fiscal note," a required statement estimating what any given bill would cost taxpayers.

The original fiscal note showed a deal-killing $385 million in the first year. Three days later, that quietly dropped to a much more palatable $15 million a year. Asked to comment Friday, the legislative analyst in charge cited an office policy against speaking publicly.

Cornett, R-Whitesburg, denied applying any undue pressure.

He said his bill is about equity, not throwing a favor to road builders.

It's simply unfair to exempt coal trucks from the weight limit, but nobody else, Cornett said. The best solution is to exempt everyone in the minerals industries, he said.

"It's not all about road maintenance," he said. "You have to factor in the employment and other contributions of the coal and gravel industries. It's a mistake to only consider the roads."

Wrecked roads and crashes

Coal operators long argued that they could not turn a profit by hauling only 40 tons a load. The General Assembly obliged them in 1986 by creating an exemption solely for their trucks.

Since then, 60-ton coal trucks -- with legal wiggle room of a few more tons -- have become familiar sights in Eastern and Western Kentucky.

In 2004, the Transportation Cabinet sold 2,520 "extended weight" exemption decals for coal trucks, collecting $725,403 in fees. The money is meant to help pay for additional maintenance needed for roadways, although it falls short of the true cost by an estimated $10 million a year.

While these biggest of big rigs help the coal industry cut costs by requiring fewer trucks and drivers, they also anger motorists with whom they share the road.

There are potholes and cracked pavement. One of the busiest coal roads, U.S. 23 in far Eastern Kentucky, must be repaved about three times more often than other highways, according to studies.

There also are horrific wrecks. At least 53 people have died and 536 have been hurt in Kentucky crashes involving coal trucks in the last five years, according to federal highway data, although the weight of those trucks is not known.

Aggravating matters, weight limits were considered more of a floor than a ceiling for years. A 1999 study showed that 88 percent of commercial trucks barreling down a single Eastern Kentucky coal road were illegally overweight. The heaviest topped 110 tons.

But then last year, during a state crackdown on overweight trucks, an unhappy gravel trucking firm sued the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet in Pike County.

One of the company's trucks had been cited for running a 60-ton load; it argued that Kentucky's unique exemption for coal trucks is unfair and unconstitutional.

In November, the judge in the case said he would postpone action because Cornett, the Whitesburg lawmaker, had pre-filed legislation to expand the exemption to all minerals industries. Better for the legislature to deal with the problem, the judge said.

Price drops

Cornett said he filed his bill after hearing from non-coal companies that want to run their own trucks above the 40-ton weight limit.

One of the companies Cornett said he consulted, Lexington-based Mountain Enterprises, is the dominant road builder in Eastern Kentucky. It's also a source of campaign donations. Cornett alone took at least $10,000 for his 2004 election from the boss, Leonard Lawson, and Lawson's family and employees.

Lawson did not return a call Friday seeking comment.

Cornett denied that his bill is favor-trading.

Rather, he reasoned, his bill is necessary to defend the coal industry's weight exemption, which has boosted the Eastern Kentucky economy. If the legislature does not act immediately to spread the exemption to others, it seems inevitable the courts will strike down the coal exemption.

"The rules for one should be the rules for all," Cornett said. And "if coal has to go back to 80,000 pounds, the coal truckers are going to go out of business. They'll suffer just like the sand and gravel trucks are suffering."

What remains uncertain for now is how much state taxpayers would lose under Cornett's bill.

On Tuesday, legislative analysts issued a fiscal note for House Bill 8 that estimated an annual cost of $25 million for state road and bridge repairs, and a one-time cost of $360 million to replace bridges unable to handle 60-ton trucks.

Left uncounted was the additional cost to counties to patch up their roads and bridges.

Cornett said that seemed far too expensive. He asked the analysts to try again.

On Friday, they issued a revised fiscal note that repackaged the numbers. That has raised questions at the Kentucky Transportation Center, which provided the original data.

The annual maintenance cost dropped to $15.3 million. This assumed that a state crackdown on overweight trucks would discourage scofflaws from illegally damaging the roads, while the traffic citations would create a lucrative revenue source.

That's "a bit of a stretch," said Paul Toussaint, director of the UK-based center.

The revised fiscal note took the one-time $360 million expense of replacing bridges and spread it so many decades into the future that it would carry "no immediate cost." The huge sum had effectively vanished.

That maneuver might work on paper, but it's "a little bit iffy" in reality, Toussaint said.

An estimated 237 state bridges are not designed to carry 60-ton trucks. The state cannot delay replacing the bridges for budget reasons unless they are indefinitely closed to heavier trucks, which would clog truck traffic on other routes, he said.

More trucks, more danger?

Sixty-ton trucks are not any more dangerous than 40-ton trucks, said Charles Lovorn, Frankfort lobbyist for the Kentucky Association of Highway Contractors.

Lovorn, a chief promoter of Cornett's bill, compares trucking to grocery shopping: You can use large paper bags or small plastic bags, but you're carrying home the same amount of groceries either way.

If anything, he said, smaller truck loads mean more trips, and more chances for crashes.

"If people want 50 percent more (40-ton) trucks on the road, that is a huge safety mistake," Lovorn said.

Besides, Lovorn said, just because gravel trucks could be authorized to haul 60 tons doesn't mean a fleet of them will suddenly blanket the state. Sixty-ton gravel trucks would be needed less frequently than critics seem to fear, he said.

"It is basically wherever you need a load of gravel," Lovorn said. "So it's not going to be open season on roads."

But safety advocates predict that "open season on roads" is exactly what awaits.

Industries that win the right to haul overweight loads in Kentucky will descend on other state capitals and use Kentucky's law as their leverage to win more exemptions across the country, said Gerald Donaldson, senior research director for Advocates for Highway and Automobile Safety in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile, it's unlikely that Kentucky's sand, gravel and stone companies will be the last to want heavier trucks, Donaldson said.

"You'll have the ... concrete lobby, even the garbage truck lobby, asking for weight exemptions," he said. "There is no end in sight."