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Semi-Safe

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At the end of the meeting, Pasadena police Captain Gary Cunningham stated that the department would continue to enforce the law. Robinson did offer to set up a safety session with Miller and any interested companies or truckers to help them understand how to better comply with the rules in the future. "Did they ever get back to us?" asks Robinson, telegraphing the answer with upraised palms. "No."

Miller and his gang may not have taken advantage of Robinson's offer, but they did have a plan. On April 27 they met with state Senator Mario Gallegos and repeated their harassment charges. And they talked about the weigh station. "We mentioned, how is it gonna be when they put in the scale?" says Luis Hernandez. "It's gonna get worse."

Gallegos evidently swallowed even their most exaggerated assertions. "The stoppages on trucks had soared over the last eight months" by 1,000 percent, he says. (In actuality, they're down slightly from 1997.)

Under the circumstances, Hernandez says, the senator promised his support. "He just told us he was gonna try and do his best to help us."

State Representative Robert Talton peers at a map tacked to the wall of his storefront office in a run-down strip center a few blocks south of Pasadena City Hall. He's trying to show that the proposed weigh station is in his district, but the map shows otherwise. "Looks like they changed it on me," he says. "It was inside the district."

Talton insists his involvement with the issue has been minimal. His first encounter with the project, he says, was at an April 30 public hearing he attended with his wife at Sam Rayburn High School in Pasadena. According to several in attendance, the two stood at opposite ends of the room as Talton's wife fired loaded questions at Loni Robinson that clearly indicated opposition.

After the meeting, an angry Robert Metcalf challenged Talton's assertion that he'd known nothing of the project prior to that evening. The officer reminded Talton of a conversation they'd had about the weigh station seven months earlier at the Highway Grill off 225. Metcalf says the legislator had responded enthusiastically -- he could even arrange for Governor Bush to come down for the ribbon cutting. "He told me he was going to use his clout," Metcalf says. "They'd just make it a big hoopla."

Talton wouldn't explain his change of heart, Metcalf scowls, "He never said a word. He turned around and walked away."

The representative says he knows Metcalf, but can't remember any conversation at the Highway Grill. "I don't remember seeing him, but that's possible," he says.

A couple of days after the public hearing, Talton got a call from his legislative colleague, Mario Gallegos. "He asked me if I'd help him," says Talton. "That's when I wrote a letter to TxDOT."

The letter requested project information. After he reviewed it, Talton says he did a little research, beginning with a field trip to the DPS weigh station on I-10 in Chambers County. When he tried to get into the station area, he found his path blocked by a line of trucks backed up along the shoulder of the road. "What surprised me was, even with 26 or 28 officers, they couldn't check all the trucks," he says, imagining the nightmare of a similar jam in the urban environs of Pasadena.

A phone conversation with DPS Captain David Kemp, who heads the regional license and weight division, proved the kicker for Talton. Kemp told the legislator he had major reservations about the weigh station. "He said it's not safe, and his troopers won't use it," Talton says.

Kemp offered the same sentiments to the Texas Motor Transportation Association, an industry trade group active on legislative matters. An article in TMTA's July newsletter stated, "According to Capt. David Kemp ... the proposed site poses some safety concerns for them, therefore the DPS would not be using it."

Kemp says he first found out about the weigh station from TMTA in May. But Loni Robinson says he talked to Kemp about the project several times before that, including at a March 13 meeting of the Houston Area Transportation Safety Association. "I know for a fact I mentioned it to him," Robinson says.

That TMTA should call Kemp makes sense, and not only because DPS manages weigh stations -- the agency has a historically chummy relationship with industry. "They knew that was the place to go," Robinson says.

TMTA also contacted Talton, asking him to speak on the weigh station at a June 17 regional meeting. Noting that Talton had "expressed concerns over the project," the newsletter article stated that the legislator "indicated that ... he had been asking questions about this plan ever since he heard about it, but was given few answers."

The association has made no bones about its own position. Quoted in the newsletter, TMTA director of information Les Findeisen said, "I feel it is premature for any city to have an inspection station."

On July 8, Talton and Gallegos (who had also conferred with TMTA) sat down with TxDOT district engineer Gary Trietsch and asked him to take a look at the project. "[Talton] just voiced concerns about the thing," Trietsch says." To be honest, I can't remember what his concerns were."

Starting in the spring, Trietsch says, his office had been "getting all kinds of phone calls." No one logged them, but Trietsch remembers they came from "elected officials, the public, this and that."

In the wake of his meeting with the two legislators, Trietsch conducted his own review, which apparently consisted of a look at the plans and a glance through the documents. And he heard from someone in his office (though he can't recall whom) that DPS had relayed safety concerns about the plan. Asked who at DPS had offered their opinions, he again pleaded ignorance. "I don't have any idea," he says.

Even in a vacuum Trietsch says he would have drawn the same conclusion after his review: The project had to be killed. "Everything in my experience told me this thing had a good chance of not working," he says. As for the various studies and assessments done by his staff and the city of Pasadena that indicated otherwise, Trietsch says opinions can differ. "Nothing against those studies," he says. "I've also done enough studies that say everything's right, and it doesn't work."

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