State Sen. Clark Jenkins, acting on behalf of the N.C. Home Builders Association, breathed new life Wednesday into a bill allowing fully loaded construction trucks to use roads that are not strong enough to bear their weight.

Legislation introduced by Jenkins in March would have allowed construction trucks to ignore signs put up by the state transportation department to keep heavy trucks from tearing up light-duty roads. His bill passed the Senate in May by a vote of 48-0 but stalled in the House Transportation Committee.

Neither Jenkins, a Tarboro Democrat, nor the Home Builders Association asked for a hearing in the House committee. They had another plan. On Wednesday, they asked the Senate Commerce Committee to graft the language in Jenkins' bill onto another bill that the House had already approved.

Sen. R.C. Soles Jr., a Columbus County Democrat who is chairman of the Commerce Committee, and the two co-chairmen, Sen. Tony Rand and Sen. David W. Hoyle, all said they didn't know the substitute motion was coming. Neither did Department of Transportation officials until just before the meeting.

"I had been told in the hall there was a committee substitute to that bill that they wouldn't let anybody see," said Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat who opposes the measure. "I had never seen it."

In a few minutes, it was all over; Jenkins' substitute was adopted on a voice voice.

Under Senate rules, Rand said, the substitute bill -- House Bill 669 -- would be voted on today by the full Senate. If the Senate adopts the committee substitute, the bill will go back to the House for concurrence.

Jenkins and R. Paul Wilms, director of government affairs for the home builders, spoke in favor of allowing fully loaded construction trucks to use roads with lower posted weight limits. Neither man could be reached for comment at his office Wednesday afternoon.

Jenkins, a former member of the State Board of Transportation, told The News & Observer in May that his bill should be approved as a matter of fairness. Legislators have already granted similar breaks to trucks that haul garbage, seafood, logs, sludge, Christmas trees, crops and other materials.

"I don't see how you tell a contractor that he doesn't have the same right that a forest product guy does, or an ag products guy does, if his business is to deliver to that site," Jenkins said in an interview.

The Home Builders Association, which represents about 16,000 companies associated with the home-building industry, boasts on its Web site that no other trade association is as successful or influential in getting the General Assembly to do its bidding.

In the last session of the General Assembly, in 2003-2004, the home builders association tracked 1,427 bills, the Web site said, defeating every bill the association opposed and winning passage of every bill it supported.

The home builders gave legislators $230,938 during the past two years, an average of about $1,350 for every member of the House and Senate. The association's political action committee contributed $3,373 to Jenkins in 2003-04, which put him in its top 15 recipients.

This bill would be another in a series that have reduced DOT's ability to protect state roads from heavy trucks. Bills allowing other fully loaded trucks to exceed posted limits or increasing maximum truck weights passed in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004.

DOT Secretary Lyndo Tippett said in an interview that he found out late Wednesday morning that Jenkins would try to insert the language of his truck-weight bill into a bill the House already approved.

Tippett said he went to the Commerce Committee meeting and spoke against the substitute motion. He said Wilms told the committee that fewer trucks, heavily loaded, would do less damage to roads than more trucks, lightly loaded.

Tippett called that an interesting theory that "defies common sense."

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