The state's top highway official said Thursday that Gov. Mike Easley had encouraged him "to take whatever action is appropriate" to mitigate damage caused by overweight trucks.

Secretary of Transportation Lyndo Tippett asked members of the state Board of Transportation for their suggestions and said he would share his plan with them, possibly at their meeting next month.

"Many of you have expressed interest in the overweight truck issue, and I can tell you that it is a great concern to the department inasmuch as we've spent well over a billion dollars in the last four years to improve maintenance on the very roads we're trying to protect," Tippett said.

The News & Observer reported last week that vacancies among state weight enforcement officers had increased, fines and citations had dropped by more than half in five years, and the legislature had approved 10 laws in 12 years that make it easier for fully loaded trucks to use state roads not built to take the pounding.

The damage to roads costs more to fix than owners of heavy trucks provide in taxes.

In a telephone interview after the meeting, Tippett said the state Department of Transportation will consider using a provision in the law to override legislative exemptions that allow fully loaded trucks to use fragile secondary roads.

The DOT has "posted" 2,305 miles of roads to try to limit access to trucks with maximum axle weights of 13,000 pounds instead of the normal 20,000 pounds. Legislators have exempted trucks hauling crops, sludge, wood chips, Christmas trees, garbage, fish and other things from the posted weight limits.

Lawmakers also gave the DOT the authority to set aside those laws, but the agency has never done that.

Another option, Tippett said, is speeding up renovations of the state's outmoded and worn-out weigh stations. Only 45 percent of trucks that pass the state's eight interstate stations are being weighed during the week, and the stations are usually closed on weekends.

"I think that will be looked at in conjunction with [the Department of] Crime Control, since they're charged with operating them," he said.

But Tippett said he is looking more at changes that can be made quickly.

"I'm not looking at three years down the road," he said in the interview. "I'm looking at 60 days.

"I'm going to present a plan that I have been mulling over for a few days. I have not shared it with anyone at the moment, and I'm not prepared to share it with you. I need time to develop a plan that's workable. I just don't want to do window dressing here."

A 3-legged stool

Tippett said the DOT could not solve the problem of overweight trucks alone. He compared the solution to a three-legged stool, representing the DOT, the legislature and Crime Control & Public Safety. Crime Control, through the state Highway Patrol, is responsible for enforcing truck weight laws.

"We've got to have legislative cooperation; we've got to have enforcement," Tippett said.

He said his agency would consider asking legislators to repeal weight laws passed by the legislature, including those that allow trucks weighing more than 80,000 pounds to use secondary roads. On better-built interstate highways, 80,000 pounds is the limit unless the trucker has a permit.

But Tippett pointed out that the DOT had been ineffective at lobbying against passage of those laws.

The patrol commander, W. Fletcher Clay, says he can reverse the decline in the truck weight enforcement numbers if he is allowed to complete the integration of officers who do that work into the patrol, and fill the vacancies. It appears now that the legislature will let him do that.

Clay and Bryan E. Beatty, secretary of crime control, met with chairmen of the House Appropriations Committee last week to make their case -- and an eight-week transition school scheduled to begin Monday is still on. The school is designed to fill gaps in the officers' training and instill the values of the patrol.

Legislative leaders have considered undoing the transfer of the weight enforcement officers from the DOT's Division of Motor Vehicles to the patrol. They talked about halting the transition schools and, instead, creating a separate division in Crime Control for those officers.

But Sen. Clark Jenkins, co-chairman of the Transportation Oversight Committee, said this week that if he were a committee of one, he wouldn't do that. "I am personally not inclined ... to shuffle them around again," Jenkins said.