Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Page 7
AFFAIRS OF STATE (Column)
Drivers Pay for Smog Check Certificates—but No Certificates Exist
By DAVID KLINE
When California’s mandatory smog check program began back in 1984, drivers paid $6 for the required “certificate of compliance”—the nice-looking piece of paper sent to the Department of Motor Vehicles to prove the car passed the test.
Eventually, the DMV and the smog check stations upgraded to a system in which the stations use computers to send notices to the DMV electronically just seconds after a car passes the test.
No more certificates for motorists to lose. No more envelopes and stamps for mailing certificates to DMV. No more need for DMV employees to input information from certificates sent in by millions of drivers.
All that paperwork hassle is gone, but one thing remains—the fee that a driver pays for what still is referred to as the smog check “certificate.”
And, although the cost of certifying compliance with anti-pollution laws should be going down dramatically as technology increases efficiency, the cost to motorists actually has increased. The nonexistent certificate now costs $8.25.
In 1993, a conservative Republican in the state Assembly introduced legislation to require all smog check stations to send notices to the DMV electronically by 1996, with a corresponding elimination of the charge to motorists. The fee was not eliminated—the legislation was.
It’s no mystery why the fee has remained in place. The assessment is small enough that it doesn’t get much of a rise out of drivers, but all of those $8.25 payments add up to millions into the state treasury every year.
The money goes into the Vehicle Inspection and Repair Fund, which totaled $64.5 million back in 1990 and now stands at more than $96 million.
According to state law, the fee must be calculated so that it “shall not exceed the amount reasonably necessary to fund the operation” of the smog check program.
Logically, then, the fee should be decreasing. Computers should have reduced the cost of labor and materials. Twenty years of experience should have resulted in streamlined administration and elimination of waste. If the fee truly is calculated based on the cost of the state’s oversight of smog checks, it should be next to nothing by now.
If nothing else, the growing number of cars, trucks and SUVs registered in California should be spreading the burden among more people and reducing the per-vehicle fee.
Instead, the smog check fee is the highest it has ever been and the Vehicle Inspection and Repair Fund is raking in almost $100 million for the state every year.
The “certificate” charge has become a general tax, separate from the Vehicle License Fee in accounting, but identical in purpose.
If government programs had to pass an annual test as strict as the one that our cars undergo, perhaps this sort of disguised tax could be stopped before taxpayers’ faith in government is completely exhausted.
— Capitol News Service
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company