The state of Kansas has proposed to eliminate mailing car tag renewal notices to residents, instead proposing to mail small postcards this year, asking residents to renew online and print out a renewal. So Wyandotte County now is considering spending $45,000 to do what the state formerly did – send out the license renewal notices by mail.
This state cutback has the potential to lose significant revenue for Wyandotte County, UG officials believe. They discussed the issue at a UG committee meeting Monday night at City Hall.
“We believe the potential impact on the office will be additional phone calls to our phone banks, both 311 and the phone bank we have in our office,” said Debbie Pack, UG director of revenue. There will be additional walk-in customers in the office, too, she believes, if the postcards alone are used. The state has proposed to eliminate the renewal notices starting in August of this year.
The UG has already implemented an additional $5 fee to be assessed on anyone who walks in to renew tags because it wanted to encourage people to renew online or by mail, which is more cost-effective for the UG, she said.
“We feel this postcard initiative by the state is going to be very counter-productive to that initiative,” Pack said at the meeting.
She said the postcards would increase delinquent taxes because people will just forget – they will get a postcard and forget to follow up to go online to pay their taxes, she believes.
If the UG does nothing, and the state sends out postcards, the UG could lose significant revenue, according to UG officials.
The state has supplied the county with a form so that it can print its own notices, she said. The cost of outsourcing the printing of the notices will be about $45,000 a year, with about 75,000 renewals sent out a year in Wyandotte County, she added. It is not feasible for the staff to do this with the resources it has, she added.
On Monday, she said she heard there was an effort to revise one of the bills in the Senate so that a renewal notice must be provided by the state. However, she advised the UG that it should move forward under the assumption the county must provide these. The county must notify the state by June 5 on which direction it wants to go because of the printing deadlines for the postcards, she said.
About 12 to 15 counties are now discussing efforts to move forward with printing their own renewal forms, Pack said. Residents of about 90-plus counties won’t get a renewal form and will only receive postcards, she added.
Lew Levin, chief financial officer for the UG, said the treasury office collects about $18 million for the different governmental entities in motor vehicle renewals. The UG’s share is $9 million, he said.
“It’s a major revenue source to all taxing entities in Wyandotte County. We just believe the postcards are a less efficient way to invoice our customers and for us to collect the revenue,” Levin said.
UG Administrator Doug Bach said, from a business perspective, “if you lose a tenth of those who were coming in to renew, you’re making a very bad business decision.”
“I don’t like this from the aspect of what the state has put forth is just not taking responsibility for something they’ve done for years, that they’ve funded. It doesn’t make any sense from that perspective. I don’t have any bills that I get at home that I don’t get a reminder from the billing company, that says, here’s your bill and tells me what it is, and tells me to go pay it. And most of these send you an envelope, or they’ve worked hard to get you online for that bill payment. They don’t try to go real lax about it and say, here’s a bill, you might want to look and see if you have something, and not even really be any detail, particularly something that’s done on an annual basis.
“It’s a really ridiculous thought process that’s going through the state to throw this away, to say they wouldn’t do this. I don’t know how we could be attentive to the needs of our citizens by not letting them know it, and then increase the level of delinquency, where we have our citizens out there getting tickets because of this, and then we collect less revenue in the end. It doesn’t take very many car tags to get to $46,000,” Bach said.
UG Commissioner Brian McKiernan said he was disappointed the state has chosen to shift another cost to the local government rather than continue to be responsible for it as they have been in the past. Even though the UG is trying to offer an incentive for online renewals, it also knows there is a large percentage of residents who don’t have easy access to the Internet and the ability to print those notices off or to renew online, he said.
“I worry that we will see a great uptick in citations for expired tags, expired registration, and in many cases it will be a situation where the citizen has overlooked, or forgotten, or not been able to comply, and it’s just going to create a lot more work across the board. Although I really don’t want to spend this money, I think it’s a good, responsible move on our part to move forward with this plan,” McKiernan said.
