Rollout of new Kansas license plates has been a hot mess from the get-go. Why is that? | Opinion
Getting new license plates used to be simple.
If you went down to the tag office, they’d just hand you one. Or if you ordered by mail, they’d send it to your house.
If you liked the design of your new plate, good for you.
If you didn’t, well, you could always pay extra and get a specialty plate, proclaiming how much you love guns or oppose abortion rights (to any out-of-state readers, those are actual examples of Kansas specialty plates, I didn’t make them up).
Anyway, license plates have gotten a lot more complicated these days.
In the past year we had one new plate design announced where pretty much everybody said “oh hell no.” That ill-fated attempt was rolled back and since then, we’ve had two online elections to pick new plate designs.
The new standard plate, chosen in December, has a picture of the Native American archer statue on top of the Capitol dome.
The new personalized plate design, chosen last month, has a field of green representing the Flint Hills in the month or so of each year when they actually are green.
While all this was going on, things got pretty tricky.
July was my month for new plates and we were well into August before I got them. And then, when they did arrive, they were the same old design, a blue-and-white plate with half the state seal on it.
I felt like I was in some kind of strange state of Kansas knockoff of Jerry Seinfeld’s “soup Nazi” comedy sketch: “No new plates for you.”
And to compound the surreality of it all, the registrations and plate stickers arrived in the mail weeks before the new plates did.
In the interim, we were issued paper license plates, along with a firm admonition NOT to put them on the car, but to keep them in the glove compartment — and NOT to put the new stickers on the old plates that were already on the car.
The state Department of Revenue, which is responsible for all this, predictably didn’t return a phone message seeking an explanation.
But I did talk to Brandi Baily, the Sedgwick County treasurer who’s tasked with distributing plates to the public on behalf of the state.
Baily described the implementation of new plates thusly: “It was a big confusion, a big mess. And if you want my honest opinion, it could have been done a lot better.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Baily said the newly designed plates were supposed to start going out in January. But with the pushback against the first design and the subsequent online votes to replace it, counties didn’t get permission to start issuing the redesigned plates until Aug. 12.
Earlier this year, the tag office was sending out the paper plates in plastic protectors, so they could be put on cars until the new permanent plates came.
Then, “We got an email from our our mailing services department that we had already exceeded $50,000 in mailing fees from January through March, because of mailing these out in that plastic cover,” Baily said. “We were having to put them in a special envelope, which was costing more postage . . . about $1.70 each to send out.”
The state wouldn’t reimburse the county for the extra expense, so Baily reached out to other county treasurers to find out how they were handling it.
“They said, ‘Well, what we’re doing is we’re just putting a letter in there’ . . . a lot of them have worked with the Highway Patrol,” she said. “So I did reach out (to the public) that if it’s in your glove box, all you have to do is pull it out, show that you’re getting a new plate, and they’ll be okay if you get pulled over, it wouldn’t be a big deal.”
The reason for the delay between getting your sticker and getting your new license plate is because of a change in state policy so that local tag offices no longer get a supply of plates to give to the customers, Baily said.
“As soon as we issue a plate — and that’s why you don’t get it right at the tag office anymore — is because then it goes to the state, and then the state processes that, and it then goes to Center Industries, which is here in Wichita, and they print our plates for us and mail them directly to the customers,” she said.
“They (the state) are giving us dates; here’s what’s happening, and then things aren’t working, so the dates change,” Baily added. “We’re at the mercy of the state, and whatever they decide to do is how we implement. And if things go wrong, then we kind of suffer, because we’re facing the customers directly and trying to have to explain what’s going on.”
So while the temptation might be to go yell at the nearest tag office clerk, don’t.
Be kind. They’ve been jerked around by the state as much as we have, probably more.
This story was originally published September 6, 2024 at 4:46 AM.
