Bend over NJ, come and pay me

[derf]

http://www.app.com/article/20090223/...30316/1001/rss

TRENTON — Motor Vehicle Commission fees for things such as documents, motorcycle registrations, commercial-driver exam permits and bad-driver programs may rise substantially in a few months.



Costs wouldn't increase for driver's licenses or car registrations. But fee increases of 50 percent or more are proposed for some MVC transactions, among them a jump in costs for motorcycle registrations from $10 a year to $65.

In all, the added fees would cost motorists an estimated $40 million to $60 million a year. All that money would go back to the motor vehicle agency, which faces a deficit of about $27 million in the upcoming fiscal year.

The proposed fees are designed to reflect more closely the commission's cost for those transactions, said Sharon Harrington, the MVC's chief administrator.

"Some pieces of our business were subsidizing other pieces of our business, which isn't fair to the taxpayers," Harrington said.

The MVC can't charge more for a service than its costs to provide it. So the state calculated costs for transactions by figuring out per-minute cost for processing various requests — accounting for things like salaries, overhead, legal services and tech support — then multiplying that cost by the number of minutes it takes to complete each task.

Most of the proposed increases exceed the rate of inflation since the last time the different fees were adjusted.

Fees for copies of documents such as driver history abstracts, suspension notices and violation records would go to $15 from between $4 and $10 today. Fees to attend driver improvement and probationary driver programs would go from $100 to $150. Boat ownership certificates would jump to $60 from $20 or $30 now. Other fees would rise, as well.

Steve Carrellas, coordinator of the New Jersey chapter of the National Motorists Association, said the fees sound fair — if the money stays with the MVC, as required under state law.

"Nobody wants any price to go up if you're the user of a service that has a higher fee, but I always have this thing about fairness — that as much as you don't like it, in having a good explanation of it and being able to trust that explanation, is it fair? And this sounds like it meets that test," Carrellas said.

Assemblyman David Rible, R-Monmouth, who has proposed legislation that would put an 18-month ban on any new state rules raising the cost of living or doing business, questioned the plan to increase the fee for a commercial driver license examination permit from to $125 from $35.



"Right now with the economy, people struggling to find jobs, a CDL license, increasing that fee, that kind of bothers people just trying to get a job that requires a CDL. Now they're paying more. It's just the wrong time to be raising," Rible said. "But as you know as well as I do, there's a shortfall in Trenton, and people are going to try to be coming up with money in all strange places."

Harrington said the fee proposal has been under examination for a year and that the CDL example is actually one where the state considered the "shock value" of the increase. Actual costs to issue one of those permits is around $437, the MVC calculates.

Harrington said other fees aren't included in the proposal because of the recession.

"In this economic climate, we didn't look at auto dealer licenses because they're under enough pressure at this moment as it is," Harrington said.

Harrington said many of the fees that were chosen for the proposed hikes haven't been increased in more than a decade. Motorcycle registration fees, for example, haven't been raised in 40 years.

The MVC can increase fees once a year, but a fee that is increased can't be raised again for another five years. Steven Robertson, the agency's legal director, estimated that less than a quarter of the fees MVC charges are affected by the proposal.

The higher fees won't take effect until July at the earliest. The public can send written comments to the MVC until April 18. No public hearings are currently planned.