AMA’s vehicle registration auto-renewal helps drivers avoid tickets
Officially, Nate Tasker’s job is to oversee the registries for the Alberta Motor Association’s contact centre.
Unofficially, he helps Alberta drivers wrapped up in red tape. He’s listened to their gripes about regulatory hassles, given them a shoulder to cry on and helped steer them in the right direction for years.
Lately, he’s started hearing a new complaint: “Hey, how can my car’s registration be expired? Why didn’t I see a reminder in the mail?”
The reason, Tasker explains, is that the provincial government has stopped sending out vehicle registration renewal notifications in the mail to most Albertans.
The change came into effect in April 2016. Those over the age of 70 had an extra year of reminders in the mail, but this period is now expired. Except for those with disabilities, every Albertan is responsible for making sure that the vehicles they own have valid registration.
The change saves taxpayers around $3 million a year. But it’s also left some with tickets for driving with expired registration, which come in at $310.
When Tasker or a member of his team deals with an AMA member facing such a ticket, they have good news and bad news to deliver.
The bad news is once you’ve got a ticket you have to pay it. The buck stops with a vehicle’s owner for making sure that registration is valid.
But the good news is that the AMA has a solution to make sure that its members won’t get dinged again.
The association’s vehicle registration auto-renewal service handles the entire registration renewal process for members. Once members go through the quick online or in-person setup process, AMA’s staff handle everything, every year after. Members simply receive their renewed registration documentation, including licence plate stickers, in the mail before their registration expires.
Though members still need to pay their own registration fees, AMA provides the renewal service free of charge.
Tasker says the renewal service has been popular since it launched last year, with 66,000 AMA members signing up for registration renewal of 113,000 vehicles. His small team mails out around 9,000 renewed registrations eachmonth.
But AMA hopes to see those numbers climb — dramatically. Roughly one million Albertans hold AMA membership. If they all sign up, Tasker’s team will see its workload increase around 20 times, though he’s confident they could handle such a change.
“We definitely have plans for expansion if the numbers go exponentially higher,” he says. “We’ll be able to cope with the growth. The important thing is that this will reduce the number of tickets handed out to our members.”