Do you drive? If so and you’re a resident on Nevada you also must have auto insurance. After all it’s the law.

Aside from the fact that here is a law mandating you to buy something you may or may not need or even may or may not be able to afford (which seems like a sweet deal for the insurance companies who can now provide inferior service for more money and will not be held accountable) there are other consequences implied just for owning a car in Nevada. Here is a little story of what I have been through.

Once upon a time there were a couple of months that I did not pay for my auto insurance. Why you ask? Was I strapped for money and still driving? Did I just want that new iPhone and took it out of my car insurance money? Nothing like that, I was simply out of town in another state and driving a rental that had insurance. During that time it seemed a waste of money to pay for insurance for a car that was garaged so I didn’t bother (times are tight after all). I bet you would have done the same. So now obviously my insurance lapsed, but so what, I renewed it as soon as I got back. So what’s the problem?

Fast forward six months…

On the way to work I am pulled over and given a ticket. Not for speeding, not for improper turns or even faulty equipment, but for SUSPENDED PLATES! I ask the officer what’s up and he explains the plates have been suspended for about 3 months. Now what he was doing running my plates when I had done nothing wrong is a question I wonder about, but the only thing on the citation was for suspended plates. “It’s a fix it ticket and you won’t be fined if you take care of it…” was his exact words. Boy was that wrong.

Onward to the DMV to find out what happened. Well it seems that because my insurance lapsed for the two months I mentioned above my plates were suspended. What? Excuse me I was not even in the state and the car was garaged, why did I have to pay for a service that I was not using? I stopped my cable and newspaper for the same time, no problem there. Didn’t matter, if you own a car in the state the car must me insured whether it is used or not. Really? That makes no sense, what about display cars? What about non-operable cars? Turns out if I wanted to lapse my insurance for two months I would have had to come down to the DMV and fill out a form informing them of the dates (as if I would have known the dates for my travel) then come back and fill out another form to reinstate the insurance. All of this is at no charge other than standing in line for about 4 hour each time. No thank you. If this is available online I was not informed but I COULD NOT FIND THIS ONLINE. Upshot: It cost me $250 to get my plates out of suspense and I renewed them while I was at it so I didn’t get pulled over for expired plates.

What is really messed up is the timeline this all happened in. First there was the lapse of insurance for two months. Two months AFTER that the DMV sent out a card that said my plates were suspended. When I card went out I had insurance. That card was return by the postal service as if I had moved; I had not. The problem with the postal service is a completely different rant, but one not quite on point here, although I do blame the Post Office for this mess. Please note that there is no warning, no attempt to correct the situation, just an arbitrary suspension of my plates even though I was insured at the time of the suspension. The suspension period is in no way overlapping the time I was actually uninsured (which would make sense). It’s sorta like whacking your dog in the nose with a rolled up DMV Ordinance Book two months after the cat dropped the dead bird in the kitchen. The dog did nothing wrong, what was wrong was easily solved, and the punishment was completely overblown when the event had been completely forgotten and never even really noted in the first place.

Now to phase two, dealing with the courts over this.

There are two sets of windows at the court house when dealing with tickets, municipal court and all others. This was a municipal court ticket and the line moved slow, I mean really slow. You would watch then numbers being called slowly and between each one it seemed the clerks would take a break between each one. Some would literally just sit there waiting for the number called to come up, some times up to 5 minutes without someone coming before they finally got the idea that no-one was coming. Sometimes they would chat with the clerk in the next window over, now two windows not helping anyone. It was criminal while a hundred people waited to be called. Oh, and wouldn’t you know the other windows moved about 10 times faster, I did the math.

Anyway I finally get to the window and show all the paper work and am told: Another $350 for the courts time. WHAT??? I was told this was a fix it ticket, here it’s fixed. Nope, the court fees were $350 dollar for something that I fixed, that was not a problem in the first place, that I was not informed about because the Post Office screwed up (BTW, I got confirmation on this and was able to prove residency but it did not matter). “Well sir, you can always tell it to the judge…” came for the bored clerk. Well, I had invested a lot of time in this so far, and in fact if you include the $250 and $350 it would have been a lot cheaper to have continued the insurance than to put up with all this, but in for a penny in for a pound and I was given a court date a month later.

The final phase, getting before a judge.

So down to the courts I go. Remember those lines I had to sit in for the ticket the first time? Well I had to sit in them again just to get on that days docket. Yep another wait that would render the most sane person questionable after it. Then after I got on the docket… “Come back at 3pm but be here at 2pm to check in and wait again.” I had cleared the whole day for this… I was right to have done it. Ridiculous.

I will skip the line to check in and then the line to get in and then the wait for the court to come to session (30 MINUTES LATE) and move on to what I should plea. This is an interesting question. I was indeed driving on suspended plates, but the plates should never have been suspended in the first place. Guilt? No, again, the plates should not have been suspended in the first place. No contest? Same as guilty right? Not guilty? Well this would at least let me state my case. Then I am interrupted in this reverie and find out this is just a hearing court and if I state “Not Guilty” I would have to come back again. Again… all this because some stupid DMV ordinance that is very faulty suspended my plates…

Quite frankly I could not afford to take another day to deal with this, so with the taste of disgust in my mouth I plead “No contest” and was not given a chance to talk, and the judge knocked $100 off the court costs.

Total fines, fees, and time lost from work for this whole Megillah: $806
Cost for two months insurance: $248

One of the things that I noticed though were how many people seemed to be in the same predicament. In the session I sat in on there were at least 7 others with the same suspended plates issue. This really makes me think… So, did the DMV suspend plates without notice on purpose to raise revenues? Were the police asked to run as many plates as they could to catch as many people as possible with this scam? It seems far fetched but oddly doable. If you think about it this is possible. What amazes me when you think about it is how many people really got caught in the scam and never made it this far? How many just paid all the fines and never really thought the whole thing through. Now what I wonder is how many other scams are there to raise revenues off the shady dealings of the DMV.