House Bill 334 was approved by the House Transportation Committee, 16-9 in a near-party line vote, on Monday. According to Rep. Barry Jozwiak, R-Berks, PennDOT stopped issuing the registration expiration stickers in January 2017. Since then, he said, PennDOT has lost $22 million in 2017, $11 million in 2018 and $18 million in 2019, for a total of $51 million, all in lost registration renewal revenue.

“The system of not putting expiration stickers was tried and failed,” Jowziak said during Monday’s meeting. “It has become a public safety issue in my opinion. It is time to put the registration stickers back on the vehicle license plates and let’s make sure all vehicles on the road are properly inspected, insured and registered.”

Rep. Stephen Kinsey, D-Philadelphia, and Rep. Mike Carroll, D-Luzerne/Lackawanna, both voted against the bill after questioning Jowziak. Kinsey asked how the legislation deals with an issue Philadelphia faced in years past when people would steal the stickers from other people’s license plates so that unregistered vehicles could be driven and look as if they were registered. Kinsey asked if the sticker could go inside the windshield like it does in New York state. The Philadelphia Democrat also asked if there were any statistics showing how many times police had pulled over drivers for having an out-of-day sticker on their license plate. Jowziak said he did not have those numbers. Carroll agreed with Kinsey that stolen stickers were a serious problem in Philadelphia while also questioning Jowziak’s lost revenue statistics. Carroll said PennDOT statistics showed a minimal variation of about 12,000 vehicle registrations from 2016 through 2019 — a number he said should not outweigh the added convenience of the current system.

“So what I would say is that while I respect the desire to have additional probable cause for police officers to pull folks over, it seems to me police officers have plenty of probable cause — (driving) across the center line, it swerved, there’s a light out on the vehicle,” Carroll said. “I think the trade-off here in terms of making sacrifice for convenience to bring back stickers isn’t worth it, and so I’ll oppose the bill and hope that we as a society and a law enforcement will recognize the need that sometimes things evolve and the return to the past with respect to stickers is probably not a great idea.”

Rep. Barry Jowziak, R-Berks, discusses his bill to reintroduce registration expiration stickers to Pennsylvania drivers’ license plates.

Jowziak said Carroll’s statistics don’t take into account what happened in the years before 2017, when Pennsylvania added at least 115,000 new vehicle registrations a year. In his view the PennDOT statistics since 2017 show car owners are simply not re-registering their vehicles.

“When it came to 2017, 2018 and 2019, it showed a sharp decline which is why the revenue was not created for PennDOT,” Jowziak said. “PennDOT today is crying for more money to fix roads and bridges. And, by the way, there’s only two states that don’t put stickers on cars ‚ Pennsylvania and I think there’s one in New England. All the rest of the states have expiration stickers on them.”