ST. LOUIS — City officials are about to debut a new weapon in the region’s war on temporary license plates: They’re going to loan the scofflaws the money to get legal.
The city has set aside $350,000 to help people pay for proper registration and insurance on their vehicles, which the mayor’s office thinks will ultimately make the streets safer for everyone.
“We know that drivers who have those things often are safer on the road,†Sara Baker, a top aide to Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, said at a recent meeting. “And it helps others also out there who might be involved in incidents with those drivers.â€
The proposal marks a new approach to an old problem that has gotten worse here and in recent years. Other cities have focused their efforts on ramping up ticketing and even towing cars with expired tags in response to growing frustration from constituents. But Conner Kerrigan, the mayor’s press secretary, said ºüÀêÊÓƵ needs to go beyond the traditional law enforcement response to help people who cannot afford sales taxes and insurance on their vehicle, and provide them with financial counseling — and cash — so they can help themselves.
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It could also provide some financial benefit to the city — some of the unpaid sales taxes are owed to City Hall — though Kerrigan said that's not the intent.
Dave Stokes, of the libertarian Show-Me Institute, was skeptical of the plan. He said that people who can’t register their car because they can’t afford to pay the associated sales taxes should buy cheaper cars.
“It seems crazy,†he said. “Taxpayers going to loan tax dollars to other people to pay their taxes.â€
“I would expect a very small number of these loans to be paid back,†he said.
Expired temporary tags have long been an irritant for drivers who dutifully pay the sales taxes and insurance premiums on their vehicles — requirements to get proper plates. And they are a particularly gnarly problem in Missouri, where an antiquated state system hasn’t allowed for the collection of taxes at the dealerships. Rather than paying both at a dealership, buyers just pay for the car and drive off with paper “temp tags.†They then have 30 days to go to the state license office to pay taxes and get their plates.
But the problems — and the anger they fostered — got worse during the coronavirus pandemic.
License offices closed to protect their employees, causing disruptions and delays in processing registrations. The state, looking to help residents, extended deadlines, leading to long lines at the offices when they reopened. And police, the usual deterrent to driving unregistered, reduced or halted stops for minor offenses: In 2019, ºüÀêÊÓƵ issued 17,023 tickets for registration-related violations. In 2020, it issued half that number.
And as the emptied-out streets here and elsewhere were overtaken with reckless driving that drove record numbers of fatal crashes, temp tags became an easy target for people frustrated with the lawlessness.
Social media users competed to post photos of the longest-expired tags. A powerful state senator from Springfield overseeing the construction of a $50 billion state budget said that when his constituents called him, they brought up temporary tags more than almost anything else. One south ºüÀêÊÓƵ resident grew so frustrated that one day last year, he ripped a two-years-expired temporary tag off another person’s car and wrote in to the newspaper about it.
“I’m an old man but got a big thrill like a kid opening Christmas presents when I ripped that tag off the car,†he told the Post-Dispatch then.
State lawmakers finally responded last year with a new law requiring dealerships to collect sales taxes. But the state is still working on getting a new state computer system in place to allow that to happen.
In the meantime, other cities in the region have responded by ramping up enforcement. Last summer, Ferguson police started pulling over violators on “temp tag Tuesdays.†On one of those days, police Chief Troy Doyle said officers made 52 stops in just 24 hours, identifying 41 expired tags.
In August, the city of St. Charles launched a temp tag tip line inviting residents to submit their photos of old tags to the city. They got 4,000 submissions inside of a year, and police officers followed up a number of them with tickets.
Here in the city, however, police are still giving out significantly fewer tickets for registration-related violations; a spokeswoman said they're more focused on speeding and red-light running. And a wave of new leaders at City Hall, including Jones, have said they want to target the root causes of the city’s problems, and have emphasized the need to try new things.
“It’s clear that the old way of doing things has not been successful at this point,†said Kerrigan, the mayoral spokesman. “We need to take a more holistic approach to this.â€
The exact details of the plan are still being worked out. A request for proposals says loan recipients will need to be city residents. But it does not spell out limits on a recipient’s income level, or whether the city will charge interest on the loans.
Maureen Hanlon, a top attorney at the liberal civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders, said the idea of trying to help people afford license plates rather than ticketing or arresting them is a good one, she said.
“The devil’s going to be in the details.â€