Compromise bill on bridge fines passes

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, May 2, 2008

By Katherine Gregg
Journal State House Bureau

PROVIDENCE — What started as a weight limit for trucks traveling over the Pawtucket and Sakonnet river bridges morphed into a compromise last night that relies on promises the state police will not slap truckers who have laminated “empty” signs in their windows with new $3,000 fines aimed at raising money for the cash-strapped state.

The legislation that cleared the House Finance Committee still bans vehicles with more than two axles from crossing the Route 24 bridge over the Sakonnet River and the Route 95 bridge over the Pawtucket River, over the strong objections of several lawmakers from the Tiverton-Little Compton area. The legislators were concerned about making below-weight and even empty trucks take a circuitous, unnecessary and costly 15-mile detour to or from Aquidneck Island. Roundtrip, the detour would take the trucker 30 miles out of his or her way.

With gasoline near $3.60-a-gallon, Rep. John J. Loughlin, R-Tiverton, warned his colleagues the legislation will, at minimum, hike the cost of travel for Aquidneck Island boat-builders, the lumber and home-building industry and even the local trucker who heads out with an empty 3-axle truck to pump out cesspools and that increase will inevitably be passed along to consumers already reeling from skyrocketing costs.

An excavator from Tiverton, lobbyists from the Northern Rhode Island and Newport chambers of commerce and an array of businesses as well as two of Loughlin’s Republican colleagues from Aquidneck Island and the Sakonnet peninsula echoed his concerns in testimony to the committee.

Rep. John Patrick Shanley, the South County Democrat who negotiated the compromise bill, said the new 2-axle limit was aimed at solving state police concerns about how they would stop and weigh trucks on Route 95 near Pawtucket — to determine if they were over the 22-ton limit — before they were out of sight and over the state line.

But lawmakers familiar with the routes around the weight-limited Pawtucket bridge said the detour is unlikely to take a trucker more than 5 or 10 minutes.

Shanley said he was told by Governor Carcieri’s legal and policy advisers that the state could not come up with different rules for the two bridges even though a detour could add as much as 30 miles to the roundtrip between communities on both sides of the Sakonnet Bridge.

But Shanley said the state police assured him “they are not going to be writing up empty lumber trucks,” or go after trucks with laminated signs in their windows that say “empty,” even if the truck clearly has more than two axles.

And if they do, both Shanley and House Finance Committee Chairman Steven Costantino told the excavator from Tiverton to “let us know.”

The bill now headed to the full House for a vote addresses a second concern raised when the new two-axle limit and $3,000 fine were approved as part of the big deficit-closing bill that cleared the House last week, the Senate yesterday and the governor less than an hour later. The so-called “trailer” bill clarified that each “unit” of a vehicle could have two axles, such as a pickup truck with a two-axle boat-carrying trailer.

The steel beams supporting both bridges have been damaged by years of rust. The Department of Transportation has imposed a series of weight limits on vehicles crossing the Sakonnet River Bridge, most recently setting a 22-ton limit last June. In November, a similar weight limit was set for vehicles crossing the Pawtucket River Bridge.

The DOT plans to replace both bridges and hopes to do it within three to five years. In the meantime, DOT engineer Robert Rocchio said recently it is critical to protect the bridges from being damaged further, possibly to the point of having to close them.