Commissioners oppose lifting truck ban

Spokane County commissioners slammed the brakes Tuesday on a plan to route truck traffic through an Otis Orchards residential area for three years while a Spokane River bridge is replaced.

“We need to find a better solution,” Commissioner Bonnie Mager said, citing 83 letters of opposition to a plan to lift a truck ban on Wellesley Road, between Seltice Way and Harvard Road.

Temporarily removing the truck ban, imposed in 1999 at the request of residents, would have accommodated semis and other heavy trucks that use back roads and the Seltice Way bridge near Stateline, Idaho, to avoid congestion in Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls.

The move also would have accommodated westbound truckers who want to avoid the Washington port of entry scales, critics said. In fact, Wellesley Road resident Dan McQueary saw no other reason for truckers to cut through his neighborhood.

McQueary is one of several residents who circulated fliers against lifting the truck ban. Even with the ban, he said, “we still get a lot of cattle trucks from Canada.”

Westbound truckers who want to get to the scales would get onto Interstate 90 before reaching the state line, McQueary said in an interview. They wouldn’t take a detour that would add – as County Engineer Robert Brueggeman estimated – six miles to the trip by forcing them to double back.

Brueggeman told commissioners Tuesday that he was pursuing another option: Getting permission from the Idaho and Post Falls governments to post signs directing trucks onto Pleasant View Drive, a north-south, four-lane road that connects Seltice Way and I-90 at the Post Falls outlet mall.

County Commissioner Mark Richard said he learned from personal observation that routing trucks through Otis Orchards was a bad idea.

He said he watched a fleet of East Valley School District buses pulling onto Wellesley, “and I could just see the problems with semis coming down that street, even if they were doing 25 miles per hour.”

Then Richard went to Otis Orchards Elementary School, where administrators and the school’s parent-teacher organization opposed lifting the truck ban. Richard said he watched as children walked home along the edge of Wellesley Road – on a “very narrow” asphalt walkway separated from the road by a speed bump-style curb.

“It’s like a balance beam,” Richard said of the curb. “They’re walking along this ‘balance beam’ and some of them are falling off into the street.”

Commissioner Todd Mielke joined Mager and Richard in directing Brueggeman to keep the Wellesley Road truck ban in place and place signs in Idaho to direct trucks onto Pleasant View Drive.

Brueggeman said he had already arranged a meeting with Post Falls officials to discuss detour signs.

Mager said she was pleased that Brueggeman also was working on a plan to use larger type on signs advising neighborhoods of proposals such as lifting a truck ban.

Trooper Jeff Sevigney, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol, said in an interview that his agency was prepared to deal with whatever decision commissioners made.

“We’ll deal with this the same way we do every place,” Sevigney said. “Wherever there are scale houses, there are trucks trying to go around them. I don’t see anything changing other than we might have some more traffic on county roads.”

Sevigney said the WSP uses vans with portable scales to catch truckers who bypass scales.

“We can take the enforcement to them if they don’t want to come to us,” he said.

Brueggeman said the two-lane bridge to be replaced is one of three built with a design susceptible to failure when the metal “hinges” connecting sections of the deck become corroded. Parts similar to the pintle and gudgeon of a household door hinge become corroded, preventing the bridge from flexing when it expands and contracts.

As a result, the bridge can break. Brueggeman said the Harvard Road Bridge had to be replaced in the late 1990s when one section of the bridge deck dropped about four inches.

The Barker Road bridge in Spokane Valley also is showing signs of failure, and city officials are designing a replacement, Brueggeman said.

He said a new Seltice Way bridge is expected to cost about $12 million, with 80 percent of the cost paid by a state grant.