Proposed hauling fee is likely not enough

AJefferson County Quorum Court committee approved the idea this week to charge commercial haulers a $50 fee, and while we support the idea, we can’t imagine that $50 will address the problems the committee discussed. The proposal will now go before the full quorum court.

The issue is that some haulers, identified by the committee as mostly being loggers, are creating damage.

“The main problem we’ve been having is with the loggers tearing up our county roads,” said Kenneth Whitmore, the county’s environmental officer.

Whitmore has been trying to police the matter himself and said he has collected about $15,000 in the past couple months, but because there is no law that directs him to collect the fees, he said some loggers are not wanting to pay up.

“I took it upon myself to go out and talk to these loggers that if you tear up this road, you are going to have to pay for it,” he said.

This reminds us, to some degree, of the euphoria over the discovery of natural gas in what is called the Fayetteville Shale in north-central Arkansas. (The image here is lots of dollar signs.) People in other parts of the state that had had their own experience with gas drilling companies cautioned that these outfits would likely damage the roads in and around these gas drilling areas.

And sure enough, that’s what happened. Ten years ago, what is now called the state Department of Transportation determined that in about a 10-county area, 538 miles of state highways had been damaged and that the price tag for repairs was $218.7 million. That figure was seven times more than the increase in the severance tax on natural gas that the highway department received.

Obviously, logging trees in southeast Arkansas does not equate to the thousands and thousands of heavy trucks that hauled all the millions of tons of machinery and sand and gravel that the natural gas drilling operations created.

But there are similarities and takeaways, with the main aspect that entities that damage public property need to stand good for it. For that reason, a blanket $50 may be the wrong approach, although it’s a start.

That figure is the amount to be charged “per site,” as county officials described it. Our question is, does a per site basis adequately protect the roadways or should the determiner be how many acres the site is or the units of lumber that are removed and hauled away?

What we don’t want to occur is what happened in the Fayetteville Shale area where the public was left to fix the roads that others damaged. In that sense, $50 just doesn’t seem like it will make much of a difference.