Cazenovia police officers recently wrote more than 30 vehicle and traffic tickets in one day as part of their first joint venture with state Department of Transportation officials to inspect commercial vehicles coming through Cazenovia.
But stopping and inspecting commercial vehicles is not as simple as doing the same for regular cars. Two part-time Cazenovia police officers were sent to commercial vehicle school in the fall of 2015 to be taught all the details about commercial vehicles driving on public highways.
“This is a safety issue because Route 20 is a major thoroughfare and in my experience … I thought it was a good idea to have people with a knowledge of this,” said Cazenovia Police Chief Michael Hayes. “The majority of commercial drivers are knowledgeable and safe, but it only takes a small minority to have something go wrong [on their vehicle] and they come barreling down Albany Street in a truck weighing over 18,000 pounds toward the school kid crossing the street.”
The Cazenovia PD/state DOT inspection site, which was set up at the intersection of routes 20 and 92 on May 31, had commercial vehicles pull into the Trush property former car dealership at the south end of the lake. There, the trained commercial vehicle inspectors would examine the vehicle inside and out to ensure everything was legal and up to code.
Some of the tickets written on May 31 were for issues such as having a defective parking brake (three tickets), failure to have a fire extinguisher in the vehicle (three tickets), hauling an insecure commercial mower and failure to have a rear object detection system in the vehicle. All of the tickets written are returnable to the Village of Cazenovia Court.
Cazenovia police started doing commercial vehicle inspections last November and issued a large number of warnings to people they found in violation, Hayes said. “My philosophy has always been education before enforcement,” Hayes said.
The May 31 inspection site was the first one working the DOT and, moving forward, Hayes said he hopes to make such inspection sites either a monthly or even bi-monthly occurrence.
