JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF MY TIME. Remember last week's sermon?

Repairs to the yellow and blue highways will involve local and state taxes. Perhaps, though, hard budget constraints for state and county highway commissions will concentrate the mind.

Liberalized axle load limits certainly concentrate the damage.

New laws allowing heavier trucks on lower-grade roads are keeping county crews busy.

They’re busy posting lower limits on most county roads in the system, restricting truck weights to the former 73,280-pound limit instead of the new 80,000-pound limit.

Why? Because 80,000 pounds is just too much, DeKalb County Highway Department Director Bill Lorence said. The difference may seem small, but Lorence said that damage becomes exponential with each additional pound.

The new weight limits that went into effect Jan. 1 eliminate the difference between designated highways – state highways and interstates – and non-designated highways, which are municipal, township, county and lower-grade state roads that didn’t meet the criteria to be designated.

Those Passenger Rail projects look relatively less expensive, once pothole repairs and congestion costs figure in.

Infrastructure is also a concern for Jim Linane, who has taught truck-regulation enforcement to local agencies – including some in DeKalb County – for 35 years.

Linane has proposed forming a committee of state and local road officials, government officials, law enforcement officers and trucking industry representatives to discuss issues that have arisen with the new
laws.

“Lower-weight roads were not designed to take that size of truck, that length of truck; they will cause more damage if they go unchecked,” he said.

This places the burden on the local road districts to make repairs, he said.

The Highway Trust Fund is not the only source of road funding that's being robbed to free resources for other government projects.

The truck-regulation changes are within the Video Gaming Act and Budget Implementation Act, passed into law last July. Part of the legislation doubles the penalty for overweight violations, with the extra amount funding state capital projects.

An increase in fees is also going to the state, similar to when lawmakers enacted the 80,000-pound limit for state highways years ago to match the interstate standard. Then, local agencies weren’t affected because the changes were on state roads, Lorence said.

“Now, we’re getting the trucks but no money,” he said.

The Video Gaming Act? The Highway Lobby and its useful idiots in libertarian circles would have us believe that the road network is self-supporting.