Panel OKs relief for logging truckers

The state Legislature’s Transportation Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to OK emergency legislation that will give state logging truckers some temporary relief from high diesel prices by increasing the amount of wood they can haul.

The committee’s 13-0 vote, said state Sen. Elizabeth Schneider, D-Orono, will clear the way for the bill to sail through both the House and Senate. She expected Gov. John Baldacci would sign it into law Tuesday.

“For the state forest products industry, this [bill responds to] an absolute crisis, and I think that the legislative leadership understands this,” said Schneider, who co-sponsored the bill with Baldacci and Rep. Boyd Marley, D-Portland.

“It will help monetarily. Is it only the beginning? I hope so,” Schneider added. “It can be the difference between buying groceries and making a truck payment. Those are difficult decisions, especially when you have families to feed.”

The bill will increase truck weight limits from 100,000 pounds to 105,000 pounds for six-axle trucks until April 1, allowing truckers to haul more wood less often. It came from suggestions made by the Coalition to Lower Fuel Prices in Maine, a grass-roots organization formed early last month and composed of independent logging truckers and others affected by high diesel-fuel prices.

In Maine, prices average about $3.70 a gallon, compared to $3.62 a gallon across New England and $3.39 nationwide. They were about a dollar less per gallon in Maine a year ago. The coalition estimates more than 50 of the state’s independent truckers have been forced into bankruptcy because of the rising fuel costs. Independent truckers are the connective tissue of the state’s $11.5 billion forest products industry because they haul fiber from woods to mills and to market, the coalition points out.

“What I think they [legislators] understood was that this was an issue of timing for the forest products industry, so raising the limits for those truckers will help them get through the winter,” Schneider said.

The timing is critical, Schneider said, because truckers and loggers stop work during much of the spring. If sufficient fiber stockpiles aren’t created now, mills could be forced to shut down during mud season, when logging roads are impassible – creating a greater crisis in the forest products industry.

Belinda Raymond, the coalition’s co-founder, testified during the committee hearing in Augusta on Thursday. So did Schneider, Dale Hannington, president of Maine Motor Transport Association, coalition organizer Larry Sidelinger and Reps. Jeff Gifford, R-Lincoln, and Doug Thomas, R-Ripley.

House Speaker Glenn Cummings, whose testimony and support Schneider and Raymond called crucial to the bill’s passage, called the proposal “an important first step in showing that the Maine Legislature understands that there is a crisis out there for the state’s transportation industry,” among others.

Coalition members are discussing temporarily repealing sales taxes on spare parts and tires, lifting truck axle-weight limits and lifting the diesel-fuel tax for logging truckers. The last would save truckers as much as $150 a week, according to some estimates.

The bill is, he hopes, “the beginning of a lot of things,” Raymond said.

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