If you live in Virginia, you know about the car tax.
In reality, it’s a personal property tax that’s applied principally to cars and boats, but, in addition to paying the tax on your car, it’s been an annual tradition in the Old Dominion that you have pay an addition 25 bucks for a sticker to put on your car’s windshield.
Quite honestly, I’ve never understood the logic behind it. And, in the past several years many Virginia counties have started doing away with both the sticker and the $ 25 sticker tax.
When you think about it, getting rid of the sticker makes sense. But, then again, when did politics make sense.
This year, the Prince William County Board of Supervisors talked about following the example of neighboring Fairfax County and getting rid of the county sticker; but, inexplicably, they decided not to:
County stickers will remain a fact of life.
The Prince William Board of County Supervisors voted Tuesday to keep the stickers.
County stickers will remain a fact of life.The Prince William Board of County Supervisors voted Tuesday to keep the stickers.
During the most recent budget process, the board asked staff to look into the possibility of eliminating the county stickers.
But questions about long lines at the landfill stalled the idea.
Chris Martino, the Prince William director of finance, told the supervisors that county residents would be issued landfill stickers to replace the personal property tax decal that allows people to enter the landfill.
“We think moving to this solution - that is a separate land fill decal - is the most viable, the most cost effective and the most appropriate [option],” Martino told the board.
To a logical person, it would seem to make sense. Every resident of the County would be entitled to receive a car decal that would allow them access to the PWC landfill off of Route 234. The county would be saved the administrative costs of managing the decal program. The county police would be saved the hassle of deciding whether or not to pull over a driver just because they didn’t have the right tax decal on their car.
It all makes sense, unless you’re a member of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors:
Supervisor Martin E. Nohe, R-Coles,was skeptical.
“How many people come through that gate on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday?” he asked.
“Our ability to process people through that gate is linked to the ability to have the young lady at the shed wave them through, he said “Suddenly we’re going to be checking drivers’ licenses and we still have the risk of backlogs out to [Va.] 234.”
Joan Moon who is on the Landfill Oversight Committee, spoke on the landfill issue during the public hearing and said thousands come the landfill on the weekend.
“On a busy Saturday our landfill checks in 1,500 to 3,000 vehicles,” Moon said. “Please have empathy for the citizen caught in a long landfill traffic line as the gatekeeper tries by some method other than a quick glance at a county sticker to tell who’s legal to dump,” Moon said.
So, because, the county is too cheap — or too lazy — to find a different way to control access to the landfill, we have to continue operating under an antiquated and pointless registration and taxation regime ?
If the only doubt about getting rid of the sticker and the sticker tax is the landfill, then why wouldn’t a landfill sticker work ?
I’ve seen it work in other jurisdictions I’ve lived in. If you don’t have the sticker on your car, you can’t get into the landfill…..and you don’t have to pay anything to get the sticker.
But something tells me that there are motives other than making sure the access road to the landfill doesn’t get congested on a Saturday involved in this debate:
The county finance department spends about $102,200 in postage and paperwork annually to issue the county stickers.
The police department collects about $65,000 in fines from issuing citations to people who drive without the stickers and the general district court receives about $40,000 in fines from court summons issued for failure to display a county sticker.
That means that Prince William County makes a “profit” of about $ 2,800 on the sticker violation cases. And I’m not sure if that even takes into account things like mileage on county vehicles and fuels costs.
Considering the expenditure of resources, it sure seems like a waste of taxpayer dollars to me.
