Hit The Brakes On New License Plate Plan, NYers Say In Poll

NEW YORK — PlateGate lives on. New Yorkers are honking mad about the state forcing motorists to replace their old license plates for a steep fee, a new poll shows.

Some 60 percent of Empire State voters oppose the Department of Motor Vehicles' proposed mandate for drivers to get new plates if their current ones are more than 10 years old, says the Siena College poll published Tuesday.

Even more voters are revved up over the $25 fee for new plates — 75 percent of them statewide think the charge is unfair, the survey found.

"New Yorkers of every stripe — regardless of party, region, gender, race, or age — oppose the new requirement to surrender license plates that are at least a decade old for newly designed state license plates," Siena pollster Steve Greenberg said in a statement.

"Bottom line message from voters to state: NO2PL8FEE," Greenberg added.

The poll results show lingering outrage over the replacement scheme proposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration despite state officials rolling out a new plate design chosen by New Yorkers.

But a top Cuomo aide said state officials already plan to tweak the proposal they announced last month, which drew vocal backlash from Republicans.

"As the DMV commissioner said weeks ago, this proposal isn’t going forward as we have committed to working with the legislature to create a plan that ensures plates are readable by law enforcement and cashless tolling systems and creates a process where plates older than 10 years are inspected and, if still readable, can be kept," Cuomo Senior Adviser Richard Azzopardi said in a statement. "Why Siena would spend its time polling outdated information is beyond me."

Opposition to the plate replacement mandate and the $25 fee was less pronounced in New York City than in the suburbs and upstate, the poll shows. But both still drew fire from a majority of city-dwellers, with 50 percent saying they oppose the replacement scheme and 69 percent calling the fee unfair.

The DMV announced details of its replacement plan last month as it opened an online survey allowing New Yorkers to choose the state's next license plate design, which will hit the road starting in April 2020. The winning design featured several state landmarks from Niagara Falls to the Statue of Liberty.

The mandate reportedly drew fire from Republicans who cast it as an overreach into New Yorkers' pockets. State officials blamed the Legislature for setting the $25 fee, but the relevant law only says the charge cannot exceed that amount.

The design contest also reportedly sparked conspiracy theories that Cuomo, a Democrat, was rigging the vote in favor of a design featuring a bridge named for his father, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo.

"Cuomo’s new tax was bad enough but now he needs to come clean and hand over all documents and correspondence related to this so-called contest," Nick Langworthy, the chair of the New York Republican Party, said in a statement earlier this month when he filed a request for public records related to the contest.