Permanent vehicle registration approved

PALMER — After pounding the legislation into a palatable form, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly on Tuesday accepted the state’s offer of a permanent vehicle registration option, making the Mat-Su the first Alaska community to do so.

“There was pushback from the road service areas saying ‘hey, you’re cutting our funding,’” the ordinance’s sponsor, Jim Colver, said of why it took so long to hammer out a deal the Assembly would agree to.

In response to that, Colver said he shuffled around the impacts of the registration so the affect on road service areas would be minimal. He said funding from this money for road service went up 267 percent in 2013, and then got a smaller bump earlier this year.

“We’re rolling it back to the 2013 level, when we tripled your funding,” he said was his final reply to the service areas.

The change to the vehicle registration regime came as the result of a bill that Rep. Bill Stoltze, R-Chugiak, pushed through the Alaska Legislature last year.

Stoltze’s bill also contained a pretty significant compromise on funding questions. The representative said previously that he had wanted to make the change statewide, but since the revenue that comes from vehicle registration is shared with local governments he had to make it optional on a community-by-community basis.

The eventual legislation allows local governments to opt-in and create a class of permanent registrations for vehicles that are eight years or older. People with those kinds of vehicles will just have to pay a one-time fee and won’t have to renew every other year, as they currently do.

Colver has said that he believes permanent registration brings more fairness to the system, giving an option to people who keep snowplow trucks on their property that are rarely driven on the roads or to people with trailers they use only once or twice a year.

His re-jiggering of the funding allocations actually wasn’t enough to placate the service area boards, Colver said.

“I was not going to be able to win them over on this. I just got their backs up, and that’s just the way it is sometimes,” Colver said. “So to placate the concerns of some of the folks on the assembly, I crafted a sunset date. So that allows the Assembly to come back and take a look at the revenue picture.”

Even that, though, required a compromise; the sunset date was set for 2018 so that assembly members who win re-election could conceivably still be serving when it sunsets.

So they set the sunset date at 2018. The full measure passed with the sole vote of opposition coming from Jim Sykes, who has said previously that he is worried about the idea of cutting a revenue source at a time when budgets are already tight and revenue from state sources is shrinking.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.