July 7, 2008
by Doug Moe
dmoe@madison.com
Stefan Lonce, the nation's leading expert on vanity license plates, wrote a column in The New York Times over the weekend calling for a national database of prohibited automobile license plates -- vanity plates with an offensive message.
"A national database of prohibited vanity plate messages," Lonce wrote, "created with advice from First Amendment experts and open to public scrutiny, would help alleviate some of the problems of defining what 's offensive."
You might think offensive license plates would rank pretty low on the list of things to worry about these days, but in fact Wisconsin residents are notorious for taking umbrage at their neighbors' automobile license plates, and filing complaints.
A prominent Web site, www.thesmokinggun.com, once observed: "What could possibly motivate these snitches to try and stifle artistic expression? It's time to change the Wisconsin state bird from the robin to the canary."
I have made a hobby of collecting Wisconsin vanity license plate lore over the years and have interviewed Lonce, who is writing a book titled, "LCNS2ROM -- License to Roam: Vanity Plates and the Stories They Tell."
When I spoke with Lonce last year, he had just written an article for Move, the magazine of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), on the history of vanity license plates. They were first introduced in Pennsylvania in 1931, and could contain nothing beyond the vehicle owner's initials. Connecticut came next a few years later, allowing up to four characters, and now every state uses them as a revenue stream.
A recent AAMVA survey placed Wisconsin 11th among the 50 states in the penetration rate of personalized plates, which are on 5.4 percent of all licensed vehicles in the state. Our fee for the vanity plate -- $15 extra -- is cheap compared with others such as Minnesota ($100) and Texas ($40).
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