With tight budgets Connecticut towns and cities are looking everywhere they can to help the bottom line. One city said it will clamp down on people registering vehicles out of state to avoid property taxes.
It’s an issue the NBC Connecticut Troubleshooters have highlighted almost two years now.
Mayor Neil O’Leary said even though his city has recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes from a third party vendor that cruises city streets overnight with plate readers, he and other leaders want police to also become proactive with scofflaws:
“We will seek these folks out and said you know, you’ve been here legally now, you’re children are in our schools, it’s time for you to re-register your vehicle here. And anyone who doesn’t, we’ll have to take a law enforcement action, which will be our last option. Obviously we just want people to register their cars here and we will be good to go.”
There’s another good reason drivers should come clean. State leaders enacted a cap on vehicle taxes that brought them way down in places like The Brass City, explained O’Leary, “The message needs to get out there that the tax rate went almost in half from what it was. but these people, because they’re not registered in Connecticut, obviously, they don’t get bills and they don’t know that.”
Just in the past few years alone the city said it has logged almost two thousand cases of people registering their vehicles out of state. The city has even formed a commission to tackle the problem. It will issue a report next month.
