[King County] More on the Trucks at Seatac

[elfs]

Apparently, the locals have been raising holy hades over the trucks at the airport thing I earlier commented on. Omaha attended a meeting recently in her guise as a Democrat to find out that the trucks are both overweight and uncovered, and the highway patrol office is using between twelve and sixteen troopers per day to monitor the trucks. The troopers are writing tickets constantly.

The port authority has written this off as "business as usual," and both it and the construction companies are writing off the tickets as part of the price to pay for getting the runway done on time. They can do this because they're absolutely flush with taxpayer cash from property taxes, which is being funnelled to, um, state coffers by way of the state patrol.

Twelve to sixteen public peace and safety officers per day are spending their time recycling public funds in a fashion that could be covered by four port inspectors, and in a far more wasteful fashion.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Any chance of getting some high-profile press involvement on this one? After the lady that was blinded last year by thrown debris from a truck, having an uncovered load is nekulturny, with all the insult that Russian word implies... not to mention being a huge waste of resources on everyone's part....

It could be construed as misappropriation of funds... I think that carries some actual jail time? And what of the drivers? does this not count against their CDL's? After all, this is a safety violation...

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

CHP (California Highway Patrol) is nasty about this subject. I heard about a time where the officer called for a big rig tow, pointed out to the big rig tow driver that the tow-away vehicle is overloaded and must be cross-loaded to become legal, then called for additional trucks to do the cross-loading . . . and the whole shebang billed by the tow service to the guilty company, on a truck lien.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

I spoke to one of our two state reps in the area, Dave Upthegrove (a very ethical representative of the people, I might add) and got some of the skinny on it. He tried to get a bill passed that would make the port authority responsible for the bill (seeing as how they have a large sum of money basically sitting around right now from property taxes from what I have been hearing) but it never got out of the transportation committee. I'm sure you can figure out why. *cough* business interests *cough*. Anyway, he's trying to get some money into the current transportation bill to at least help fund the added police going out there, since it's not in the local or county police budget for this.

I'm going to do some more research on it talk to a few more people (since I have access to some interesting folks around here right now) and will report back on it. The end result, I'm going to see if I can get something done about this.

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

Trooper Yossarian, reporting for duty.