Have those license plate stickers become obsolete?
In his two-year budget plan, Governor Scott Walker proposes getting rid of those vehicle registration stickers, and Wisconsin Department of Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb tells the legislative budget panel this week there would be a decent cost savings by eliminating them, which he says has become “anachronistic.” He says, “Obviously we save the money from not having to print the stickers; we get rid of the issue of having a lot of inventory control problems.”
Gottlieb says the agency will save nearly $500,000 a year through printing and mailing costs.
Dan Meyer (R-Eagle River) asks whether eliminating the sticker would make the job harder for law enforcement. Gottlieb tells members of the Joint Finance Committee law enforcement even now can’t rely solely on the sticker to determine whether a vehicle is legitimately registered; they’d have to look up the license info.
“Sticker theft is a big issue, so it’s not necessarily a given that if you see somebody with a valid sticker on their car that it’s necessarily a legally registered vehicle. So my point being that at the end of the day if I’m law enforcement and I want to know if someone is driving a legally registered vehicle there’s really only one way to find out and that’s to run their plate.”
Law enforcement has the ability to look up vehicle registration information from their squad.