Highway officials in West Virginia pulled weight enforcement inspectors off most state highways and reassigned them to Interstate highways last week as part of plan to let up on enforcement until after Election Day.

According to the Charleston Gazette, field inspectors, who asked to remain anonymous, said they are unlikely to be handing out very many citations to coal, lumber or gravel trucks that violate weight laws until next month.
Joseph T. Denault, the top state highway engineer, said he ordered most inspectors transferred to interstate highways.
"We are trying to enforce weight limits on the interstates," he told the paper. "We are concentrating on those now."
Officers began concentrating on interstates this week, working along Interstate 68 near Coopers Rock where the state recently opened a new weigh station, and along I-64 near Sandstone, where a serious accident took place recently.
Inspections and citations for overweight trucks are up this year. The Gazette said state weight inspectors issued 964 citations to overweight trucks between January and September 1999. This year, during that same nine-month period, inspectors issued 1,394 citations, an increase of 43.6 percent.