State chooses to misinterpret regulations to allow Kinross trucks to operate without permits or restrictions

State regulations say that trucks that are more than 85 feet long must have a pilot car for safety reasons. The Kinross mining trucks are 95 feet long, so each and every one should have a pilot car for safety reasons, right?

Under political pressure from Gov. Mike Dunleavy, the state Department of Transportation and Public Facilities has opted to find ways to refuse to apply this rule and others.

The department has ensnared itself in a bureaucratic knot, fully aware that Dunleavy wants to say “Yes” to anything and everything Kinross wants. The state has decided the Kinross trucks do not need permits.

The department says while the Kinross trucks will certainly be long enough to require a pilot car, they will not be high enough or wide enough or heavy enough to require any state permits, limitations or restrictions—including pilot cars—along the entire route from Tetlin to Fort Knox.

How is this possible when pilot cars are regularly required on trucks that are shorter and much lighter than the Kinross trucks?

The pilot car rule is for trucks that are overwide, longer than that 85 feet and overweight.

Kinross says its trucks will weigh 164,500 pounds, more than twice as much as the trucks allowed on most interstate highways without a special permit. But the transportation department says the total weight is irrelevant. The trucks have 16 axles, so the per-axle weight is all that counts.

The trucks would only be classified as overweight—requiring a pilot car and other state restrictions— if they weighed one pound more—164,501 pounds.

That single pound is strong evidence of the “hands off” approach to Kinross taken by Dunleavy.

There is equally a clearcut case of “Say Yes To Kinross” in the route of the ore trucks through Fairbanks.

State regulations prohibit the 95-foot Kinross trucks from traveling on Peger Road and the Johansen Expressway.

The regulations are explicit and not open to interpretation.

But the regulations are open to a deliberate misinterpretation by the Dunleavy administration.

Rather than amend state regulations to allow the trucks on Peger and the Johansen, which is what should have happened to legalize the Kinross operation, the state claims it is free to twist the clear language in its regulations to allow an activity that is prohibited.

The state regulations require that Kinross use the Steese Expressway to travel through Fairbanks.

The Steese Expressway bridge over the Chena River is not physically capable of handling the overweight Kinross trucks. The Kinross trucks would have to shed tens of thousands of pounds, which would cost Kinross a great deal of money.

Rather than defend the failure to follow the clear language in state regulation—which has the force of law—the Dunleavy administration buries anyone who asks about this with a robotic recitation of other regulation numbers as dense as a black hole, from which no light can escape. Take two aspirin and try reading this for yourself.

The state retreats to this line: “The Peger-Johansen route through Fairbanks is a well-established route for long and oversize vehicles.”

But that line is not in the state regulations. The Peger-Johansen route is not legal for the Kinross trucks.

The state claims to have a hole card in regulation 17 AAC 25.014(f) and asserts it can bless the Kinross trucks because the loophole is big enough for whatever the company desires.

But the problem is the 17 AAC 25.014(f) loophole only applies to trucks going for “fuel, servicing, delivering or receiving cargo, or food or rest for the vehicle’s operator.” None of those conditions apply here. The Kinross trucks will not be “delivering or receiving cargo” on Peger and the Johansen.

The Dunleavy administration should have amended the regulation. It failed to do so. Rather than admit this failure, it has deployed a torrent of bafflegab.

The entire exercise is based on Kinross not wanting to have to get any state permits and the Dunleavy administration doing everything it can to give Kinross what it wants.

I wrote here recently that these would not be legal loads in the 49 other states. I should have said that these loads would need overweight permits in 49 states. And no state with competent leadership would deem it sensible to give overweight trucks a green light with no restrictions for years or decades to come.

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