Columnist Susan Snyder: Our state is filling its plates

Friday, April 20, 2001 | 5:07 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column also appears Tuesdays and Fridays in the Las Vegas Sun. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

Nevada has 89 license plate designs.

Or rather, it will when the new Future Farmers of America design hits the street in about three weeks.

And evidently 89 is not enough.

For next in line is a Mount Charleston plate. And proposed designs have been accepted for "Support of Public Education," "Support of Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and Sickle Cell Disease Association" and "Encourage Human Organ Donation."

The graphic possibilities for that last one make you wonder, don't they?

But wait, there's more.

Up in Carson City our prodigious purveyors of profundity are considering at least four more new license plate designs out of six that were proposed as bill drafts when the whole 2001 session started.

One Senate bill calls for an "appreciation for animals" tag. (I figure a fair number of animals would appreciate fewer cars on the road, but I don't draft bills. I only pay them.) Another proposal asks for a plate promoting the Virginia & Truckee Railroad."

Even the Outside Las Vegas Foundation has a plate on the table -- pretty slick for a nonprofit group that's been around less than a year. The tag would raise money to promote and protect the valley's federal lands.

"But you should see Virginia," Kevin Malone, the DMV's Las Vegas spokesman, said in defense of Nevada's paltry 89 designs.

He's right. Virginia is worse. It has "about 180" plate designs, according to its DMV's official website. It has so many it seems no one even bothers to count the exact number.

It has plates commemorating greyhounds, horses, butterflies, bass, turkeys (there's one for the old town car), mallards, eagles, trout, deer and one for animals in general, in case it missed one. There's a "tobacco heritage" plate but nothing for the local lung cancer association.

Maybe it's easier to get a specialty plate approved in Virginia. In Nevada, you have to get a state senator or assembly member to like the idea and make a pitch. Then you have two years to get 250 people to file a "letter of intent" saying they would buy a set if the design was available.

FFA tag supporters had until October 2003 to get those letters. They hit 317 in recent weeks so they're being released, Malone said. The Mount Charleston plate deadline also is October 2003. Its supporters are 10 letters shy of going into production.

Things don't look so good for the diabetes/sickle cell plate (16 letters) or the public education tag (18) or the human organ donation plate (93). Deadlines for those are this October, Malone said.

But plates have died before. Last year we lost the chance to hang plates for DARE and missing and exploited children on our bumpers. And by the looks of the paper trail, the Outside Las Vegas plate, proposed by Henderson Republican Sen. Jon Porter, was originally one solely for Lake Mead.

In future years it may be harder to get a special design into the hopper. A group of lawmakers who evidently think 89 plates is plenty have proposed a bill this year that raises the required number of requests to 1,000.

Even with that requirement, I think a "Nevada Brothels" design would fly. And think about the envy we'd garner from people such as all the Idaho Ferrari owners boasting "Famous Potatoes" on their bumpers.