States Of Confusion Creative License Plates Can Baffle Cops, But Needy States Welcome The Revenue
The ship’s bold outline against the swirling smoke and foam adds dark, artistic drama to the Flagship Niagara as it blasts the British at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1812.
This is no oil painting, however. It’s a license plate, and that’s the problem.
“The cops hate it,” says Thomson Murray of Syosset, N.Y., as he admires the new Pennsylvania plate, one of the latest in his collection. “Sure, it’s very pretty, but they just can’t read it.”
The blur of specialty plates along the interstates has become a bumper dilemma for some states. The plates feature creatures from panthers and manatees to Garfield the cat - and sponsor causes from environmental preservation to duckpin bowling.
Lawmakers are getting increasingly worried about license plate excess.
“With all the smoke and colors it looks like a portrait,” Pennsylvania State Police spokesman Sgt. Tim Allue says of the Flagship Niagara plate, whose fees benefit the state historical commission. Its vivid strokes and dark colors almost obscure the state name, and “it’s not real legible, especially at night,” Allue says.
Murray, who publishes an annual guide to American license plates, says he gets frequent calls for help from patrol officers.
“They have a witness who saw a car with red letters, but there were birds and fields and sunsets,” he says. “The cop doesn’t know what state it came from. So I go through all the states that have red letters and birds and sunsets.”
Some states are already stepping in to slow the creative flow.
Iowa offers “rent-a-space” decals so organizations can attach their logos to one of only four available plate designs.
Indiana has imposed a moratorium on new specialty tags, partly because the motor vehicles department is busy replacing its standard “Amber Waves of Grain” plate with a “Crossroads of America” gold and silver torch design. The new tag will be issued in 1998.
New York Gov. George Pataki vetoed four proposals for new plates last year, saying he wanted to stop the “annual deluge” of such bills. That still leaves the Empire State with about 180 varieties, ranging from professional sporting teams to bluebirds (the state bird) to regional plates featuring Adirondack mountain lakes, the Hudson River valley and Manhattan’s skyline. The Department of Motor Vehicles says the plates, which carry a $25 annual fee, raise about $2 million a year.
That kind of money is tough to ignore, despite pressure from police and motor vehicle administrators who complain the highway artistry is getting out of hand. The Pennsylvania State Police, for example, asked the Legislature to slow the approval of new plates after the battleship scene was added last year, becoming the 118th variety.
“The fact is, these fund-raising ideas are extremely popular and it’s been very difficult to stem the tide of ideas,” said Cathy Ritter of the State Department in Illinois, where a plate depicting a cardinal perched on a tuft of bluestem grass raised $2 million for state parks in two years. A plate featuring a white dove carrying an olive branch has raised $600,000 for domestic violence programs in a year.
Illinois approves so many plates benefiting so many causes - about 135 at last count, Ritter says - that an artist now works almost full time on new designs. Last year, largely because of police protests, the state reined in the program by creating two “universal” plates to cover all charitable and veterans organizations.
Murray estimates some 2,000 distinct plate designs are available to U.S. motorists. “License plates are the last vestige of states’ rights to do what they want and the federal government be damned,” he says. “It’s wonderful. They can put a potato on their plate and nothing can stop them.”