N.H. Senate Passes Measure Offering 5% Weight Tolerance

This story appears in the April 21 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

The New Hampshire Senate passed a bill that would require law enforcement to provide a 5% overweight “tolerance” for most trucks on non-interstate roads.

State Sen. Robert Letourneau (R) said the intent of the bill is not to serve as a license for truck drivers to add extra weight to their loads purposely, but rather to shield them from penalty in situations where small weight additions are beyond their control.
He said anything from temperature changes to precipitation could cause a change to the weight of loads.

“If you have a load of logs, and you run into a snowstorm and pick up a lot of snow, you could easily be overweight. That’s what this bill is meant to do — give a tolerance,” Letourneau said.

Robert Sculley, head of the New Hampshire Motor Transport Association, said his group supports the legislation.

“We needed this bill,” Sculley said, in part because the 5% tolerance will be helpful in offsetting scale differentials at weigh stations.

Letourneau said the bill had already passed out of the House Transportation Committee and was expected to be passed by the full House.

Also before the Legislature is a bill that seeks to remove the ability of the courts in New Hampshire to “mask” convictions incurred by holders of commercial driver licenses.

The House passed the proposal last month. It is currently before the Senate Transportation and Interstate Cooperation Committee.

“If someone, for example, has a [driving while intoxicated] charge and it is as filed as some other charge, that is called masking,” said Bill Boynton, spokesman for the New Hampshire Department of Transportation.

According to the text of the bill, if the measure does not pass, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will withhold funds every year until the provision is implemented.