The Columbian | Serving Clark County, Washington

Car license scofflaws, beware!

A team of enforcers intent on catching car license cheats who live in Washington but license their cars in Oregon to avoid paying Washington sales tax and license fees will soon be ba-a-ack.

In the final hours before the Legislature temporarily adjourned Thursday, Rep. Jim Moeller, D-Vancouver, won crucial Senate support for a bill that will restore the Clark County Vehicle License Task Force and dedicate a portion of the funds it generates — $325,000 per year — to its continued existence.

That’s a bargain, Moeller said, because those “license charlatans” deprive the state of as much as $10 million in revenue every year.

“The owners of these vehicles snub our state’s law so they can get out of paying our state’s sales and use tax,” Moeller said.

House Bill 2436 passed both chambers unanimously and is headed for the governor’s desk.

Under current Washington law, anyone who establishes residency in the state must register his or her vehicle here, then relicense it every year. Failure to do so carries a $529 fine.

Although the law remains on the books, the governor eliminated money for its enforcement last year to help balance the state’s budget.

The license fraud program, created by the Legislature in 2007, funded two Washington State Patrol officers, an auditor with the Department of Revenue and a crew of 10 to 12 volunteers. The team checked property ownership, voter registration, school attendance and public utility records to find drivers with Oregon plates who actually lived in Clark County.

Team members mailed more than 4,500 postcards seeking voluntary compliance and compiled a database of 53,000 vehicles with suspicious out-of-state plates. About 40 percent of residents contacted by the team complied by properly registering their vehicles and paying the licensing fee and appropriate taxes.

Education reforms

Rep. Tim Probst, D-Vancouver, who serves as vice chairman of the Education Appropriations Committee, scored an 11th-hour legislative victory with the approval of several education initiatives he has championed this session.

Three of Probst’s ideas survived as provisions in major education reform bills passed by state lawmakers late Thursday.

• Residents will be able to go online and find out how their local schools are spending state money. Probst said his language will improve a cumbersome process that makes it difficult to track school spending.

“Now the state is going to allocate money in clear, understandable categories,” he said. “We should also require the schools to use those same categories.”

• Probst also worked to head off a proposal that would have weakened high school graduation requirements. “It was getting some traction, but our committee killed the bill, and I said, ‘Let’s put language in to do the opposite and help get kids up to standard,’” he said. The bill directs the Quality Education Council to find ways to help students who are struggling to meet graduation benchmarks.

• Probst worked with Rep. Ruth Kagi, D-Lake Forest Park, on legislation that will give high school dropouts new chances to re-engage with school and career preparation and earn GEDs. House Bill 1418 will give school districts the option to offer the program to students age 16 to 21 who have not accumulated high school credits at a rate high enough to earn a diploma by age 21.

Probst introduced a bill early in the session that would have rewarded schools with excellent dropout prevention records, but funding did not materialize.

Probst said his committee tried to protect K-12 education from damaging budget cuts but was not entirely successful.

“Our job was to minimize the impact this year,” he said. “I think we did that job well, but there are going to be negative impacts. We are cutting budgets for K-12, but fortunately less than for everything else.”

“I worked closely with education leaders throughout Clark County to find out which programs were the ones they wanted us to protect,” Probst said. “They were crystal-clear: Protect levy equalization and try to reduce class size in grades K through 4.”

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