C(A)RACKDOWN
Woonsocket announces new campaign against improperly registered vehicles
WOONSOCKET — If your car is improperly registered out of state but spends the night in the city, you might be getting a ticket in the mail from the Woonsocket Police Department.
Chief Thomas F. Oats and Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt on Friday unveiled the results of a city campaign against improperly registered vehicles, a pile of 54 letters and citations that were to be mailed out to vehicle owners identified through a police operation conducted over several months this year.
The 54 vehicles were identified by police officers working the night shift and routinely recording their presence in the city for more than a 30 day period, the amount of time that drivers have before state law mandates they register the vehicle in the Rhode Island community in which they live.
Mayor Baldelli-Hunt said the resulting list of 54 registration scofflaws will now also be referred to the city’s tax assessor, Elyse Pare, for inclusion on the city’s tax rolls moving forward.
The amount of taxes to be collected will depend on the type of vehicle and the year, and that information has not yet been compiled, she noted. “In this case there are 54 cars, so at some point we can equate what that relates to in tax dollars. But this is just the first round, and there will be more to come,” Baldelli-Hunt added as a warning to those not yet cited.
Oates outlined the department’s identification effort for improperly registered vehicles at a press conference held at the police station and voiced a hope that it would encourage people to register their vehicles in their home community as state law requires.
Oates said the 54 violations going out on Friday included a summons to appear at the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal for May 17, where the vehicle owners face up to a $500 fine.
“They are going to be mailed as soon as we are done speaking to you today,” Oates said of the letters.
“The issue is, if your vehicle is registered in Blackstone, Massachusetts, or Millville, Massachusetts, or somewhere else, but you’re actually living on Wood Street in Woonsocket and that vehicle is involved in some type of criminal activity, something as even as minor as a hit-andrun accident with an unattended vehicle – We’re going back to the address in the community to which vehicle is registered, which is not accurate,” Oates said.
“It’s an issue of public safety in that my officers being involved in traffic stops and being involved with people operating these vehicles – that information needs to be accurate in case something goes wrong. We need to be able to find out where that vehicle is going,” Oates explained.
Baldelli-Hunt said the city would prefer not to have the police department “spend time doing this,” adding “We would rather have them use their resources elsewhere.”
“So hopefully this message will get out and the people who still have their vehicles registered outside of Woonsocket will register their vehicles in the city and then that will cut down on the amount of manpower that is needed to do this in the future,” she said.
Oates said the out-of-state registrations operation was begun by the department back in February and continued over a period of nights exceeding the requirement of the law governing motor vehicle registrations.
“The way that we did this is that the patrol officers at night in their regular patrols throughout the city, every night made note of particular vehicles, the same vehicle, that was parked at the same location,” Oates said. “And that information was coordinated electronically with our dispatch and that information has been accumulated since back in February,” he said.
Rhode Island general laws state that “any foreign vehicle(s) parked or garaged overnight in this state for more that thirty (30) days in the aggregate in any one year that is owned or operated by a resident of this state as defined in 31-1-18 shall register the vehicle(s) and pay the same fee that is required with reference to like vehicle(s) owned by residents of this state.”
After compiling its data on the vehicles parked in the city with out-of-state plates from the patrol officers, Oates said Police Lt. Thomas Calouro and members of the traffic division then processed the information to prepare the 54 citations that were being issued on Friday.
The information used in the citation was collected only by the patrol officers, and Oates said they were not given any specific locations to investigate.
“What they were given, was that during the course of their assigned patrol beats they were to check repeat vehicles that they see and document those vehicles as out of state,” Oates said.
Baldelli-Hunt said she has been concerned with out-of-state registrations since her time as a state representative for the city, and had even worked to improve state law addressing the problem, she noted.
“We did have an amendment to the law back in 2013 to try to ease the process a bit, but I still feel that the law needs to be amended. It is very time consuming for a local police department to monitor 54 vehicles over a period of time, and there are more out there,” the mayor said.
Prior to 2013, the language in state law was not completely clear as to where a vehicle had to be parked, or not parked, for a monitoring period to begin, Baldelli-Hunt noted.
“In the past the vehicle needed to be on the road as opposed to in a parking lot or in a driveway etc., so what would happen is as soon people learned that their vehicle was being monitored, they would take the vehicle off the street, they would move into a parking lot or into their driveway so that would then break the 30-day cycle,” she said. The law was amended so that a vehicle parked in any of those areas could still be monitored for being parked in the community over 30 days, she explained.
While other communities may also be troubled with out-of-state registrations, Baldelli-Hunt said Woonsocket is particularly troubled with them as a border community to Massachusetts. “I think it is bigger problem for communities that are border communities because obviously being on the border of Massachusetts we have a lot of folks who move in from Massachusetts and they have a one-state, one-rate, and their rate is lower than ours. So it is beneficial for them to keep their car registered in Massachusetts from a financial standpoint,” Baldelli-Hunt said.
Elyse Pare said that she has copies of the summonses prepared by the police department and will be adding the property to the city’s tax rolls as a result. “I will be assessing taxes based on the assessment in accordance with the motor vehicle phase out with the state. So each vehicle will have a different tax bill based on its year, make model,” she said.
Any taxable property in a community is to be reported to assessor annually, she noted. “So we get notified by people who register their vehicles in Rhode Island, however the ones that are registered in Massachusetts we have no knowledge of them until now,” she said. The information will be used to create tax bills for the newly discovered vehicles, a valuation that can typically be as much as $200 a year, she noted.
Oates said each mailing to be sent out includes a summons to the Rhode Island Traffic Tribunal and also a letter explaining the RI motor vehicle law “as to why they were in violation” and a second listing “what their tax obligation is and directing them to speak to the tax assessors office.”