ARE CAMERON COUNTY RESIDENTS BEING GOUGED FOR LICENSE PLATES?

By Juan Montoya

Jimmy had just returned from working in Louisiana and needed to get new license plates for his car.

A journeyman electrician, he had to leave town with a company that paid him decent wages not available locally. He left his family in Brownsville and went off for months at a time, returning only between contracts.

When he returned, he found that his kids had not paid the installments he had negotiated with the court regarding a vicious dog citation of some $186.

"I had sent the money to the house, but the boys didn't take care of the payments," he said.

When he went up to window at the Cameron County Tax Assessor-Collector, he was told he couldn't get them because there was an outstanding fine he had to pay. There was also a warrant.

Luckily for him, he had come in during amnesty week at the municipal court and the judge deleted the warrant fine and allowed him to pay $90 that he owed and gave him the release.

Expecting to pay a $10 reinstatement fee on top of the $65 for his plates, he was surprised when he got to the license plate clerk and was told that there would be an additional $30 tacked on to the $65 of his plates.

"I asked him why and he told me that the county was in a regional mobility authority and that $10 was added to the plates for that," he said. 'When I asked him about the other $20, he told me that Cameron and Hidalgo counties had followed the recommendations of the tax assessor-collector and tacked on an extra $20 to delete the ticket information from the system. All that takes is a a click on a keyboard," he said. "That seems s little extreme to me."

In fact, in looking over the amounts that counties across the state tack on for that simple function, a local television station (KRGV-Channel 5) has found out that out of all the Texas counties who have taken advantage of the reinstatement fees charged to motorists, only Cameron and Hidalgo have passed on the top limit of $20.

In fact, both are listed as having the highest vehicle registration fees in the entire state of Texas. They're almost double that of cities like Houston, Dallas and Austin. Most counties charged $10, including places like Dallas, Houston and Austin. Hidalgo and Cameron County both issued the highest fee in the state at $20.
There are some 500,000 vehicles are registered in Hidalgo County. We have been unable to learn how many there are in Cameron County.

However, that means little to Jimmy, who has found work here, albeit at a fraction of what he earned in northern states.

"If I was making that kind of money here I could understand," he said. "But when you have counties with cities like Houston and San Antonio where people make good money charging less than they charge here, it doesn't seem right. People make a lot less here."

Jimmy since has had the dog that brought him all that grief euthanized.

"I thought the saying was 'muriendo el perro se acaba la rabia,'" he said. "But Tyson (the pit bull) is still costing me money, especially with the added costs at the license plate office."