City staff made a presentation to city council about their budget status at the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2015.
There was an interesting slide that revealed their thinking about public safety and revenue.
The Texas legislature passed a new law that combines the safety inspection issue with the license plate process. We will still have to have our vehicles inspected. Instead of getting a new windshield sticker we should receive a Vehicle Inspection Report from the inspection station and our successful test should be automatically registered with the state.
When we then renew our license plates the computer will be checked to make certain that the vehicle has been inspected. If the computer has no record of the inspection we may present our Vehicle Inspection Report.
In theory this will make it more difficult to drive a vehicle that has not been inspected.
Our city finance people evidently have a somewhat different view of the results. City revenues will be lower. Take a look at this chart from the budget presentation:
Note that instead of saying that our policemen will no longer have to spend time checking vehicles to see if they are inspected. Instead staff wrote “Police Department will not be able to cite for expired inspection sticker”.
One would think that our city budget folks would keep track of what the state is doing.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
I thought it an interesting piece of legislation when I first heard about it, but I wondered about that loss of revenue on the expired inspections tickets, especially on the first year. Say you have an inspection sticker that expires in Jan 2015 but your registration expires in Dec 2015. You could go all year from Jan to Dec in an environmentally polluting or otherwise unsafe vehicle because you don’t need the inspection until you renew the registration in Dec. Will there be some consequence or fine for that?
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Maybe now they will start handing out tickets to people jaywalking and people driving while talking on handheld cell phones, both of which are bigger, more dangerous problems which they have been ignoring.
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That slide alone provides proof that tickets are a revenue generating activity which destroys their idea that its for public safety.
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This change saves the State money. As usual, it’s not about helping the communities. Oh that’s, right, we live in TEXAS!
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They can’t even collect the money for tickets already issued. The outstanding warrants list published in the Times a couple of weeks ago included more than 90,000 names, which is about one for for every five or six residents 18 years of age or older.
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For mamboman,I think you are misunderstanding the way this law will work. For one thing, should you be stopped for any reason during that the police will be able to cite you because your vehicle will not show up in their system as inspected. Also, the idea behind this is that, after about one year, every vehicle on the road will end up with the expiration date for safety inspection and registration/license plate. That means no one will be able to do what you suggest. Meanwhile, yes indeed, tickets are revenue generating activities, all part of certain City Council members’ dream of adding to the revenue stream.
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