Special license plates costly

SANTA FE (KRQE) - Offering specialty license plates is supposed to help raise money for the state and non-profit organizations.
However, the practice is instead costing New Mexico taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

"It's just something taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for, plain and simple," said Paul Gessing, president of

The Rio Grande Foundation, a conservative government watchdog group in Albuquerque.

New Mexico offers 79 different specialty license plates, each sponsored by a group, that are sold to turn a profit. Groups lobby legislators to pass a bill sponsoring their special plates.

"Organizations see this as a fundraiser," said Tax and Revenue Department Secretary Demesia Padilla, whose department oversees the Motor Vehicle Division.

Padilla said three to four specialty plates are approved in any given session. The groups are required to pay for the first 100 license plates, then the responsibility falls to the state. Drivers who want specialty plates pay anywhere from $12 to $42 more in registration fees, most of which is then turned over to the sponsoring organization.

In the last two years, the state spent $231,048.52 to order 46,891 specialty license plates, not including its most popular UNM design. MVD officials could not say how many of those have been sold.

"We sell them, so we do recoup a lot of our cost back," Padilla said. "The only time we don't is if they end up as inventory on the shelf."

But KRQE News 13 found many of those plates do end up on shelves at MVD's warehouse in Santa Fe. A recent inventory check found more than 13,000 specialty plates sitting unused. The cost of those totaled more than $62,000.

"There will be some money spent that we will just not be able to recoup," Padilla said. "There's not a real good marketing on behalf of the organizations to keep the demand for those plates."

One group that sponsors a specialty plate told News 13 it does not do anything to advertise its plates.
Padilla calls it a catch-22 because the state has to make sure all specialty plates are well-stocked.

But Gessing questions whether the state should even offer specialty license plates.

"This is something that isn't a core function of government,” he said. “This is something that's not absolutely essential, so if there's not a way to at least break even, I think the state should consider what it's doing here."

Padilla said she plans on implementing a new MVD policy that places plate orders in real-time only when they are needed, instead of ordering in bulk beforehand. Several other states have gone to real-time ordering of license plates, she said.

When the new plan goes into effect, Padilla said there shouldn't be an additional cost to drivers. It might just take a bit longer to get plates delivered, she said.