The state of Alaska is claiming that state regulations allow the Kinross ore hauling trucks to use Peger Road and the Johansen Expressway.

The Dunleavy administration is trotting out public relations people to repeat specious claims that 17 AAC 25.014 allows long combination vehicles such as the 95-foot Kinross trucks on Peger Road and the Johansen Expressway.

The lawsuit filed by the Committee for Safe Communities, charging that the state has not followed its own rules, is based on the clear language of the regulations. This is just one part of the legal challenge, but it’s important because it reflects on the state’s lack of credibility.

“Their reading of the regulation I think is a misunderstanding,” the DOTPF public relations office tells the Anchorage Daily News.

There’s no misunderstanding. And it’s easy to understand why the Dunleavy administration makes this claim.

No one wants to admit that the state screwed up.

No one wants to confess how easy it would have been to fix this problem months or years ago by amending the regulations with a public process.

The state will do anything, it seems, to avoid telling the truth on this—the regulations limit trucks on Peger Road and the Johansen Expressway to 75 feet.

The state continues to spread misinformation by simply saying the Peger/Johansen route is “well established,” as if that vague term justifies the failure to make it legal.

The regulations specify this exact route for long combination trucks to take between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay: “Richardson Highway, Steese Expressway, and Elliott Highway, AK-2, from the junction with the Mitchell Expressway, AK-3, in Fairbanks to the junction with the Dalton Highway, Alaska Route 11 . . .”

The regulations do not say that the long combination trucks are allowed to take Peger Road and the Johansen Expressway to avoid traveling on the designated route—the Steese Expressway.

The rule dictating that 95-foot vehicles should use the Steese Expressway goes back many years. It may predate the completion of the Johansen Expressway more than three decades ago.

The basic problem here is that the Steese Expressway bridge over the Chena River is not sturdy enough to handle the Kinross trucks.

The weakness of that bridge has been known for decades. The Peger/Johansen route is “well established,” as the state says, but the regulations were never updated to make that official.

The multi-year nature of the Kinross operation, 24 hours a day, requires strict attention to detail.

The state claims that this section of the regulations gives DOTPF employees blanket authority to declare any road in Alaska acceptable for 95-foot trucks if they choose to do so.

But here is where the Dunleavy administration is wrapped around the 16 axles of the Kinross trucks—the section of the regulation preceding this identifies the exact circumstances under which state employees are allowed to declare that a route like the Peger/Johansen connection is legal.

The key language says a deviation from the specified route is OK only “to access or return from terminals or facilities for fuel, servicing, delivering or receiving cargo, or food and rest for the vehicle's operator.”

The Kinross trucks will not be using Peger and the Johansen for those reasons. Not for fuel, food, rest, servicing, delivering or receiving cargo.

There is no blanket authority.

What this means is that the regulation bans state employees from issuing an edict claiming the Peger/Johansen route “will accommodate the necessary movement” and is legal.

Allowing the trucks on Peger Road and the Johansen violates the letter and spirit of the regulations.

It would have been easy for the state to amend these regulations a year or two ago. That the Dunleavy administration failed to do its homework is obvious.

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