A year after Maine’s top license-plate boss emerged politically wounded from a scandal over faulty tags, a new chapter of Plategate is emerging.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows is now recommending to the legislature that Maine stop making its own plates altogether.
After Bellows hired a Canadian company last year to help with a new plate issue, the result became a political nightmare.
The plates feature an image of Maine’s iconic pine tree but the poor tree was misaligned on many of the finished products.
Bellows got a lot of negative publicity over the misplaced tree – not helpful as she geared up for a run at the governorship.
Her office also presided over the botched new license plate rollout, leaving motorists confused, municipalities frustrated, and law enforcement struggling with inconsistent plate designs and shifting deadlines.
What should have been a routine administrative change instead became another example of mismanagement within the Department of State.
That went over so well the woman who claims to be gubernatorial material now wants to test the theorem of insanity by extending the plate-making contract with the firm in Nova Scotia.
Bellows testified at a recent hearing before the legislative Transportation Committee that the state-prison building and equipment where the plates are manufactured are antiquated.
“This may be the time for the prison to get out of the manufacturing of plates,” Bellows said.
The state contracted last year with Waldale Manufacturing Limited of Nova Scotia to produce the new plates, replacing older plates over the past year.
Bellows said that had to be done because the existing facility could not handle producing a million or more plates in a year.
She questioned whether spending millions on modernizing the facility would be the best use of taxpayers dollars.
Rep. Wayne Parry, R-Arundel, said he had a real problem with the proposal, noting the Legislature had agreed to fund $7 million last year to pay for new plates with the understanding that other plates would continue to be produced by prison inmates.
Perry said that the $7 million could have been used to modernize the prison plate-making facilities.
