Stan Semenoff Logging loses $530,000 appeal on overweight truck charges

Wednesday, 19 February 2020

Stan Semenoff Logging has lost its appeal against $532,878 of road user charges for repeatedly running logging trucks overweight on Northland roads.

The road user charges were imposed by the New Zealand Transport Agency after it found the log-trucking company had been repeatedly running overweight logging trucks between July 2016 and April 2017.

The agency analysed records for around 17,200 loads carried by Stan Semenoff Logging (SSL) during the 10 months, and found loads were above their maximum allowable weight on about 11,690 trips of those trips.

Road user charges must be paid for heavy vehicles to compensate for the damage they do to roads, and it is up to trucking companies to buy the correct licences to carry heavy loads.

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But Stan Semenoff Logging said it should only have to pay $135,365, not the $532,878 the Transport Agency was seeking.

After losing in the District Court, Stan Semenoff Logging appealed to the High Court in Auckland, but Judge Judith Gordon found the company, which was delivering logs from Northland forests to Northport for export, knew it was regularly running trucks at weights that it had not paid adequate road user charges for.

The judge also found the Transport Agency's methodology for calculating the charges was lawful.

'SSL knew that its vehicles were frequently operating above their allowable weight as they received dockets from weighbridges each day at the destination point,' the judge said.

Stan Semenoff Logging had argued the agency's methodology for calculating the unpaid charges was flawed, including because it was based on what a notional 'compliant' trucking company would have paid.

It said the agency had no evidence any log truck operators were compliant with the road user charge laws.

But the judge found: 'The alleged non-compliance of other operators does not excuse or justify SSL's own noncompliance.'

The company also argued that it could never have bought road use charge licences for the routes it ran, because they were not available.

The Transport Angency said that was because certain bridges on those routes were not rated to withstand the damage caused by vehicles operating over the default maximum weight.

'If SSL knew that permits were not available for certain routes, then it ought to have ensured that it operated below the maximum allowable weight on those routes,' the judge ruled.

The current charging system was brought in in 2012 to replace a system that was easily rorted by logging companies buying licences for a lesser weight than was actually carried.

Stan Semenoff Logging had argued it was hard for logging companies to weigh logs in forests when collecting them.

But the judge said that under the law 'the onus falls squarely on the operator not to overload.'

Stan Semenoff Logging put forward an alternative methodology that it believed the agency should use to calculate road user charges, though the agency said this alternative methodology 'would require the Transport Agency to rely on what the operator tells us, essentially turning it into something akin to an honesty box system'.

Earlier this month, the agency dropped plans to revoke Stan Semenoff Logging's transport licence.