HELENA — Imagine getting a letter about an unpaid parking ticket—a ticket you supposedly got in a place you haven’t been. That is the situation a Broadwater County family is currently dealing with.
Melissa Crowe got a letter in the mail about an unpaid parking ticket from Olympia, Wash., issued to her son Jadon Schwartz. She immediately called Schwartz to find out what was going on.
“I haven’t been to Washington in years, and I’ve never owned a red vehicle,” Schwartz said.
The parking ticket was issued to a red Honda Pilot, while Schwartz drives a gray Toyota Rav4, but the license plate number on the ticket matches Jadon’s.
“I’m asking him to go out and see if his license plates are missing,” Crowe recalled. “They weren’t.”
What is going on here? It has to do with Montana’s numbered county license plates.
“We have 56 counties, and the bullhead traditionally separates the county from the plate number,” Montana Department of Motor Vehicles vehicle services bureau chief Michael Walker said.
Some license plate readers do not pick up on that bullhead separating the county number from the rest of the plate number, resulting in duplicate plate numbers.
In Jadon’s case, the plate reader in Olympia, Wash., read a four-county plate out of Missoula as the same as his 43-county plate from Broadwater County.”
“Clearly she has a different plate, but not—(they’re) the exact same numbers,” Crowe said.
Mix-ups like this are not uncommon. License plate readers are illegal in Montana, but not in other states.
“Frequently they’re not calibrated to Montana, and that’s where we get an issue,” Walker said.
It’s an issue that’s becoming more common.
“Eight years ago, we had maybe one every few months,” Walker said. “I think currently, we get maybe one a month, maybe two a month.”
The state has a form letter explaining the situation—one Crowe and Schwartz were able to use to clarify the mix-up to officials in Olympia, Wash. There is also a permanent solution on the way.
“Starting March 17, the plates that will be produced for counties will be the county number, the bullhead, followed by an alpha character, so that issue will be resolved,” Walker said.
It won’t be an overnight fix—new plates will be sent out as plates are replaced every five years.
Crowe and Schwartz are still dealing with the fallout from the license plate confusion—while they were figuring out the situation, Schwartz got sent to collections for the unpaid ticket.
“He has great credit, and so, unfortunately, something like this could affect him,” Crowe said.
Crowe and Schwartz are working with credit reporting agencies to make sure his credit doesn’t take a hit, and they are also waiting for when Schwartz can get a new, unique plate number.
Walker noted another situation with license plates that can lead to issues—when selling, trading or getting rid of a vehicle in some other way, it is important to also remove the vehicle’s plates. Walker said MVD often sees parking violations and toll fee invoices sent to a vehicle’s previous owner because plates were not removed.
