Thomas Beyer, a police officer for the city of McHenry, has been pulling over trucks for weight and safety violations since 1980.
“We have a large gravel pit active in town,” he said, “and a lot of trucks come through.”
Beyer knows that the combination of too much weight and unsafe equipment can be deadly. “A lot of people don’t realize that a 70,000-pound truck can’t stop right away,” he said.
Each year, McHenry police write 200 to 300 tickets against trucks, but Beyer does not view tickets as the most effective and immediate way to create safer roads.
Instead, he said, “I try to work with the local companies.” When he notices a continuing problem with one of those companies, he will talk to the owners and try to get cooperation.
Many times he stops a trucker, he finds he could write a slew of tickets. But he tries to be reasonable. “I stopped an 18-wheeler with 10 bad tires,” he said. “I could have written 10 separate tickets for $75 apiece.”
Five of the tires were marginal, three were totally bald. Beyer wrote one ticket for $75 for bad tires. “There is no sense in burying the driver,” he said. “He’s driving for a company. Unless they give me a hard time …”
Another police officer in McHenry, James Molnar, also believes in following the middle of the road on violations, though he brings an added dimension to his work. After working as a McHenry police officer during the 1970s, Molnar left during the ’80s and owned his own trucking company. He had five 18-wheelers. Because of that, he knows what it is like to not only drive a truck but to comply with the various laws. He returned to police work 2 1/2 years ago.
His biggest concern is not writing citations but keeping the roads safe, and he doesn’t think it takes a lot of tickets to do that.
“I stopped a guy and wrote him a ticket for not having a state safety sticker,” he said. “He had his CB going right away, and since that day I haven’t found one guy with that violation.
“That one ticket got compliance because the word got out,” he said, because the emphasis is on compliance, not dollars.
