Saturday, August 27, 2016

the trip to the tag office...

... qualifies as a necessary evil. You don't want to pay the penalty of getting caught, being given a traffic citation for not having a current sticker on your tag. Entailing: go to court, wait your turn, stand before the judge, pay the fine, then go stand in line to get your sticker. 

Therefore the the law-abiding citizens chooses to stand in like to get the tag or just a sticker for the right to drive on public thoroughfares for another year. For many years, the law here required drivers to buy a new tag before the end of  the month of your birth. Meaning most everyone born in any given month would wait until the last possible moment to go pay the fee. Creating  long lines of procrastinators trailing out the door in the last week of any month. But the requirement now is that it must be purchased before your actual birth date, spreading the demand out over the days and weeks to ease demand and pile up at the end of the month..

The notice that I needed to renew before my birthday came in the mail early in August, along with the form that provided the info. to take to the tag office 2017 sticker for my car license plate. I went a last week to get the tag sticker, knowing it would only cost me twenty bucks. You will think: wow! And wonder: why was the price for another year of driving on the public right-of-way so relatively inexpensive???.

The answer is the legislature changed the rules so the buyer is required to pay the full amount up front upon purchase, then just the minimal amount each year to cover costs of labor/printing/services of tag office. Which means I paid thousands up front with the registration of the newly purchased car, when I went to register the purchase/title.  And now pay twenty dollars a year to get a current sticker, good for another 365 days of running around like my shirt-tail is on fire.

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