Truckers approve of big rig ordinance

SANDY CROSS - A handful of truckers gathered in a church fellowship hall Saturday agreed: Oglethorpe County leaders have made good changes to a proposed ordinance that would regulate heavy rigs that tear up county roads.

Still, some said, they don't like the message that trucks are bad and worry that sheriff's deputies will harass them.

Oglethorpe County commissioners are considering a local ordinance that would prohibit tractor-trailers from leaving state highways for a shortcut - a move to protect county roads from heavy logging or quarrying trucks and county citizens from some drivers who go too fast.

"If they obey the law and drive like sensible human beings, I've got not problem with truck drivers," said J.T. Appling, 80, who lives on Lexington Carlton Road, one of the two-lane county roads that commissioners are trying to protect.

"But when you see a truck with two big blocks of rock on it as big as your car, and it's going 70 mph, that's scary," he said. "They should slow 'em down."

As county taxpayers themselves, truckers said they don't like to see out-of-county drivers shaving off a few miles of the trip at the expense of pricey road repairs later.

"That's all we are trying to control because they are tearing up our roads. We only get $15,000 a year from the DOT (for road maintenance)," said District 5 Commissioner George Gabriel. "Our county roads are not paved to the specs to expect 80,000 pounds."

Hewitt Smith, a granite hauler, opposed the first draft of the ordinance, but he's fairly satisfied with revisions that exempt Oglethorpe County drivers or trucks registered in Oglethorpe County, allowing drivers to take their trucks home.

"The way this was written (before) left us out in the cold," Smith said.

Although he likes the changes, he worries that subsequent commissioners could add more restrictions and make the law unbearable.

Commissioners should understand how much truckers pay in taxes and fees, which add up to tens of thousands of dollars each year, Norm Pugh said.

"I'm not saying we should let everybody go up and down our roads," Pugh said.

But a sheriff's deputy won't necessarily know that a driver lives in Oglethorpe County until he stops the truck, Pugh said. Then, drivers probably will have to show the officer a copy of the ordinance to prove that the no-thru-trucks law doesn't apply to him.

"You aren't going to have deputies on your case every day," Gabriel said.

Neighboring Madison County tightened its own thru-traffic ordinance two years ago without much controversy.

As in Oglethorpe County, deputies were trying to cite short-cutting big rigs, but the law on the books was too vague to stand up in court.

"We were having a problem with deteriorating roads," said Commissioner Mike Youngblood, who's represented Madison County's District 3 since 2000. "It's pretty well curbed the problem."

But when commissioners there moved to give the law more teeth and list which roads would be limited to local traffic, the vote passed with little debate from truck drivers.

"It wasn't aimed at them and they knew it. It's their tax dollars paying to fix that torn up road, too," Youngblood said.

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