Sticker process two-step road jam
Two steps. One sticker. Long lines at assessor-collector’s offices.
And no solution, other than time and a couple of laps around the vehicle registration track.
“It’s just a transition we’re going to have to suffer through. I don’t think there’s any remedy at this point,” Williamson County Tax Assessor-Collector Deborah Hunt told me last week, adding that assessor-collectors all over the state are dealing with the problem. Wait times have approximately doubled at the Travis County assessor-collector’s main office to as much as an hour at times, officials said.
To remind you, Texans, thanks to a 2013 state law, are having to learn a new scheme for getting their vehicles inspected and then registered. Beginning back on March 1, instead of vehicle inspections and registration being separate processes as before, each with their own sticker, the two tasks are now linked. You have to have a valid inspection done before getting your car registered, and the result is a single inspection sticker on your windshield.
The problem before the change, with the unlinked system, was that people could procrastinate on the inspection and get it done several months late, making the very good bet that no cop would notice and ticket them for it. The upshot was considerable lost income for the state (which gets about $10 for each inspection) and, on average, somewhat rattier and less safe vehicles driving Texas roads.
And to make it even harder to grasp, we’re in a sort of limbo year in which officials are trying to get everyone’s inspections and registrations “synced” into the same month. I’ve written about it three times and answered dozens of questions from readers on the phone and in email, and I still have to think about how it works each time. Even Hunt said she finds the change a bit ticklish to keep straight.
So the transition, perhaps inevitably, is causing a lot of confusion among vehicle owners, who only have to think about this stuff once a year. And when people are buffaloed by government paperwork, they seek out human beings to defuse the confusion.
Those people happen to be the workers at county tax offices like Hunt’s, deputized by state law and the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles to collect vehicle regis-
tration fees. All this has meant more people coming through the door, longer lines and, often, that wrenching moment when the clerk has to tell a customer that he or she didn’t do what was needed to register the car and sends the person back out to get the vehicle inspected first.
“About 30 percent we’re still having to turn away,” said Stan Wilson, a supervisor in Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector Bruce Elfant’s office. “The first time they come in, we have to reject them.”
And then, after they get the inspection, many of them decide to come back in person to assessor-collector offices to register the vehicle, when in fact they could do it online and by mail at that point. Which leads to those longer lines.
“Bruce’s motto is, ‘Skip the trip,’” Elfant spokeswoman Tiffany Seward said. Catchy, but probably a case of cockeyed optimism.
Seward said there’s yet another new problem entwined in the change: trailers. Under the previous setup, most people either didn’t know or could safely ignore the requirement to get their boat trailers inspected. They simply could register them and skate on the inspection. No more.
“We’ve got a lot of surprised trailer owners,” Seward said. “They’re stuck with having to go figure out how to get it inspected.”
On top of that, Hunt told me, the DMV has a new computer program to handle all this, which she said runs slower than the previous version. She said it adds about two to three minutes to each registration encounter in her office.
“That adds up real fast when you see several hundred a day,” said Hunt, who simultaneously is having to cope with double-digit annual population growth in Williamson County and the consequent increase in trans- actions at her office.
And the pain probably has at least another 18 months in it. In year two of the program, from March 1, 2016, to the end of February 2017, people for the first time will confront the long-term requirement of the program to go get an inspection within 90 days of registering the car for another year.
You just know that many people, looking at just that single registration sticker on their windshield, will get the registration bill in the mail from their assessor-collector and simply mail a check back in without getting an inspection first. And here we go again.
If you’re wondering about how all this affects you and your car, go to the DMV’s twostepsonesticker.com website and click on the box that says, “When do I inspect? Calculate my date.” It’ll ask you when your inspection sticker expires and your registration year ends and tell you whether you have to go get an inspection this year before getting registered.
After that, if you’re still confused, yes, I’ll once again take your calls. You don’t even have to be a subscriber.
But, you know, you would kind of owe me. ...