City to sell vehicle stickers year-round
Chicago motorists will no longer be forced to face long lines at the city clerk’s office to purchase their city vehicle stickers, thanks to a longawaited overhaul approved Wednesday.
The City Council approved City Clerk Susana Mendoza’s plan to start selling city stickers on a year-round basis in 2014. The transition will follow an exhaustive education campaign to gather vehicle identification numbers from 1.3 million Chicago motorists. After that, motorists will be assigned a new sticker expiration date that’s six months after their state license plates expire.
In 2014, motorists will be forced to make a choice: purchase a pro-rated city sticker that carries them anywhere from one to 11 months until their new exipiration date or shell out even more money to be rid of the annual sticker headache for longer than a year.
Either way, Mendoza told the City Council that long lines at City Hall will be a thing of the past. “I’m not kidding when I tell you that people have had to take a day off from work to purchase their city stickers. That’s unaccept- able,” she said.
The switch to year-round sales — and the change to a no-nonsense sticker design that’s easy to enforce — allowed Mendoza to rid herself of the political headache caused by the annual contest to design the city sticker.
Last year’s design was pulled after it was tied to a gang controversy.