TAKING IN THE TRASH

Of the 5,413 trucks that made deliveries from January through April of this year at Juniper Ridge Landfill, formerly the West Old Town Landfill, 308 were overweight.

Of those, one “rogue” truck weighed in at 141,120 pounds – more than 40,000 pounds over the legal limit to operate on Maine’s secondary roads and more than 61,000 pounds over the interstate weight limit.

“We’re not out there 24-7 to catch that one rogue 141,000-pound truck,” Lt. Tom Kelly of the Maine State Police Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Unit said recently. “There’s only so many folks that I have in the troop that do this type of enforcement.”

Trucks leaving the Maine Turnpike and traveling on Interstate 95 north of Augusta are supposed to weigh no more than 80,000 pounds by federal law and no more than 100,000 pounds to travel on state and local roads.

Maine’s legislators and the congressional delegation continue to fight for a federal waiver in Maine similar to ones other states have received to increase allowable weight limits of trucks that travel Interstate 95 to equal the state and secondary road limits. Lawmakers submitted another bill last week to the U.S. House of Representatives and this week to the U.S. Senate to address the issue.

Overall, officials with landfill operator Casella Waste Systems Inc., which also owns and operates Pine Tree Landfill in Hampden, say the percentage of overweight trucks arriving at the facility is minimal.

“The percentage is very low, but I can’t compare it [to other facilities],” Don Meagher, Casella’s manager of planning and development, said recently. “What I’ve always suggested is if people are concerned about overweight trucks, you ought to be concerned about all overweight trucks, not just solid waste trucks.”

The company, which recognizes there is an issue with truck weights, has become stricter in dealing with drivers who consistently show up at the landfill’s scales with overweight loads. It also is creating a policy to crack down on excessively overweight vehicles.

The threshold for what’s considered an excessively overweight vehicle has yet to be decided, Meagher said.

“There will be a weight at which one strike [and] you’re out,” Meagher said. “If you come in seriously overweight, you will be out. We will not tolerate seriously overweight trucks.”

Casella already has in place a three-strikes program to control truck weights coming into the facility.

If a particular driver’s truck is grossly overweight three times within 45 days, the driver is banned permanently from making deliveries to the facility, Marty Drew, general manager at Pine Tree Landfill, said during last month’s Landfill Advisory Committee meeting in Old Town.

As of April 3, four drivers had been dismissed and forbidden from ever coming back to the landfill since Casella began operations at Juniper Ridge, he said. The driver ban does not affect the companies whose trucks the drivers operate.

Drew defined “grossly overweight” as being more than 105,000 pounds total weight, or 5,000-plus pounds over the legal limit to travel on Maine roadways, including the interstate system and secondary roads.

“105,000 [pounds] – I’ve got better things to do,” Drew said.

The majority of trucks that come in over the 105,000-pound acceptable limit are between 106,000 and 109,000 pounds.

“We bring it to their attention,” Drew said. “But on the other hand, I have to consider what they’re dealing with.”

There aren’t scales available to drivers when the trucks are loaded in most cases.

“I’m not the [Department of Transportation] and I’m not the state police,” Drew said. “It’s the state’s job as far as I’m concerned [to keep overweight trucks off the road]. I know that sounds a little abrupt and maybe arrogant, but that’s the way it is.”

State police Lt. Kelly said he also understands that it’s difficult to get accurate measurements at loading sites, but like his personnel, most truck drivers have enough experience to be able to tell if a load is significantly overweight.

“Just the laws of gravity would tell you that this seems to be a little heavier than my last load,” Kelly said.

So far this year, the Maine State Police have weighed 1,700 trucks in various ways, including weigh-in-motion scales; permanent scales at the Kittery interstate weigh station; and portable scales carried by commercial vehicle enforcement police.

Preliminary totals show that of those, 180 weight violations were issued. Information regarding the specific weights and what the trucks were hauling wasn’t available.

Violations carry a monetary fine that ranges from a few dollars to a few thousand, Kelly explained. Based on how overweight a truck is, the driver also may be required to offload some material before the truck can continue to its destination.

He added that even if Casella were to provide the state with truck weight records, which is how the company keeps track of what is being disposed of and how much to bill companies, the state police cannot issue violations on weight results from other organizations and businesses.

“One thing they could do is say we’ll only pay you up to a certain poundage,” Kelly said. Similar policies have been adopted in other places, but Kelly said he wasn’t aware of any facilities in Maine with that policy.

Kelly noted that trash trucks aren’t the only commercial vehicles that violate weight limits, but said that Casella officials have been very cooperative in trying to deal with the overweight trash truck problem.

“With their strike policy in place, I think it actually has changed the mind-set of a lot of these drivers coming into this facility,” Kelly said.