Emergency legislation that aims to give state logging truckers some temporary relief from high diesel prices by increasing the amount of wood they can haul should be ready for Gov. John Baldacci’s signature early next week.

LD 2155 passed the House with all but final approval on Tuesday and almost got through the Senate, but senators objected to passing it without a public hearing. They pushed it back to the Transportation Committee for a hearing set for 1 p.m. Thursday.

The bill will be handled quickly, said Sen. Dennis Damon, the co-committee chairman. The committee has a work session after the hearing where he expected it would pass. The bill becomes law immediately after it goes back through both chambers and Baldacci signs it.

“We can get some temporary relief for the forest products industry from those diesel prices,” Damon, D-Trenton, said Tuesday. “Increasing weights has a negative effect on roads but with roads being frozen this time of year, we are pretty confident that they can withstand it.”

Proposed by Baldacci and co-sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth Schneider, D-Orono, and Rep. Boyd Marley, D-Portland, the bill would increase truck weight limits from 100,000 pounds to 105,000 pounds for six-axle trucks until April 1. The bill also would increase per-axle weight limits to conform to the overall weight limit.

The bill came from suggestions made by the Coalition to Lower Fuel Prices in Maine, a grass-roots organization of independent logging truckers and others affected by high fuel prices that formed early last month.

Group members argued that prices were forcing into bankruptcy the state’s independent truckers, the connective tissue of the state’s $11.5 billion forest products industry, as they haul product from the woods to mills and then to market. The argument was an astonishing success. Within two weeks, Baldacci signed an emergency order that would help the industry survive the winter.

Coalition organizer Larry Sidelinger called LD 2155 “a start.”

“They have a long way to go,” Sidelinger said Tuesday of state legislators. “This is a token gesture in my book, but we asked for it, they delivered it and we still have a long way to go.”

Sidelinger, of Damariscotta, and coalition founders Al and Belinda Raymond of Kingman pushed hard to see LD 2155 include a provision that they said would really help truckers – a temporary repeal of the state’s fuel tax for truckers. The repeal would save truckers about 28 cents a gallon or as much as $150 a week, Sidelinger said.

But Damon said he could not support the repeal, saying that the fuel tax is the state’s major source of funding for road and bridge repair.

“That’s really shooting yourself in the foot,” Damon said. “What happens when there are no roads? When a bridge collapses?”

Truckers need more tangible forms of relief, Sidelinger said. He estimated that as many as 50 have stopped hauling due to high prices. Coalition members have predicted that mills will start running short of fiber if truckers cannot afford to haul it to them, or that some mills will be forced to shut down if they have to assume fuel costs.

Diesel prices have risen by about a dollar a gallon since last year. In Maine, they average about $3.70 a gallon, compared to $3.62 a gallon across New England and $3.39 nationwide, Sidelinger said.

“Why is New England 30 cents higher than the national average and why is Maine 8 cents higher than the New England average? The same question keeps coming up and we never get clear answers,” Sidelinger said. “That’s just the way that it is.”

“These are all just short-term solutions,” Sidelinger added. “They are Band-Aids on a gash.”

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