motor vehicles – Missouri House of Representatives Newsroom

House votes to Criminalize Clandestine Tracking of Vehicles

Legislation that is key in the fight to protect victims of domestic violence was one of the proposals the House sent to the Senate before legislators went home for their spring break.

*Representatives Bill Irwin, Cecelie Williams, and Kemp Strickler (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)*

The House voted unanimously to send to the Senate a bill that would criminalize the placing of tracking devices on a vehicle without the knowledge or consent of all recorded owners of that vehicle. Missouri has no prohibition on such tracking, which is often used by domestic abusers to follow the movements of their victims.

The bipartisan legislation was sponsored by three legislators. One of those is Ditmer Republican Cecelie Williams, who filed House Bill 971. She has shared several times this session her own experience as a survivor of domestic violence, in explaining why she is carrying such bills.

Williams said Missouri should be addressing vehicle tracking in law.

“This is really something that’s installed on your vehicle [or] within your vehicle, that you are unaware of that is being used to track you for any reason at all, whether there is malice or malicious intent behind it, none of that should matter. It’s that if you are going to put a tracking device on your vehicle, that all owners of the vehicle are aware that it’s there,” Williams told colleagues.

“What this bill does is it provides a criminal offense, a Class A misdemeanor for the first offense, and a Class B felony for a second offense, by violating this law and putting GPS tracking devices on a vehicle [without notifying] all owners that this was being placed.”

Two bills similar to Williams’ were filed, and then combined with hers. One of those, House Bill 978, was sponsored by Lee’s Summit Republican Bill Irwin, a retired Navy Seal and Lees Summit Police officer. When he was presented this legislation he thought, “This is very much common sense. Who could be against it?”

Irwin said he saw firsthand the “evils of tracking,” when deployed to Pakistan as a liaison officer for the Special Operations Command Central to the U.S. Embassy.

A diplomat he worked with there was a woman known for her diplomatic and physical prowess. One of Irwin’s colleagues became interested in her but she turned the man down. What happened next was frightening.

“My military coworker found out that she was returning to the states and [he] took emergency leave to go back prior to her departure. Fortunately, law enforcement had been appraised of the situation and figured out he was tracking her. They detained him at the airport and they found in his car a body bag, duct tape, flex cuffs, sharp surgical knives, and a bone saw,” Irwin told the House Transportation Committee. “Using the tracker evidence and the stuff on him they were able to send him to jail, where I believe he’s still spending time.”

The sponsor of another version, House Bill 293, is Lee’s Summit Democrat Kemp Strickler. He said his first introduction to the issue came from a constituent.

“Their partner had been tracked without her knowledge by an ex-boyfriend for quite some time, and they only found out about it because they took it into an auto repair or something like that, and they found it and that’s when they learned that she was being tracked. That was of obvious concern to them and something that he said to me, that’s something we should work with.”

He also referenced a high-profile double murder-suicide that happened in Lenexa, Kansas, in which a woman from Belton, 22 year old Sara Beck, was murdered. Investigators believe she was tracked with a GPS device by her ex-boyfriend.

“The ex-boyfriend also set up a geo-fence that would automatically notify him when she showed up at work, when she showed up at a friend’s house, and when she showed up at home,” Strickler told colleagues.

“Her father said the police have to get a warrant in order to do that to somebody. Now we’ve got the general public just doing that.”

“This isn’t going to stop it but this will allow us to do something about it when it’s found,” said Strickler.

“This is a bipartisan bill, this is a public safety bill. This is going to help protect domestic abuse survivors and hopefully it will, frankly, discourage people from placing them on the vehicles of government officials and legislators, too.”

The House voted 151-0 to send the legislation to the Senate.

House plan would stabilize Missourians’ vehicle property tax values

Missourians in recent years have been slapped with high and increasing property tax bills for their vehicles, and state lawmakers are going to try again this year to stem that.

*Representative Rodger Reedy (Photo: TIm Bommel, Missouri House Communications)*

The issue has been a top one for two legislators who were assessors before they came to Jefferson City.

One of them is Representative Rodger Reedy (R-Windsor), who sees his House Bill 1690 as a taxpayer protection act.

“We are trying to do this to make it better for our taxpayers and to be more fair to them,” Reedy said.

The other is Representative Brad Hudson (R-Cape Fair), who said when he was an assessor, “I would have never wanted to sit across the desk from someone and say, ‘Hey, you know that farm truck that you’ve got? Yeah, it’s a year older, yeah it’s got more miles on it, but I’m going to hit you with a higher assessment this year and you’re going to have to pay more in property taxes because of that.’ That doesn’t make sense. It’s not right.”

The issue with vehicle valuations began in 2020 when the COVID pandemic halted supply lines. Parts for vehicles were harder to come by this inflated the demand for, and therefore the values of, used vehicles.

“So what the end result has been, you would have the same vehicle and it would be a year older but the trade-in value would show to be higher, so your assessment would be higher and you would pay more taxes on that vehicle that’s a year older,” Reedy explained. “I basically, fundamentally think that if that vehicle’s a year older, typically you’ve got 20-30 thousand more miles on it, you should not be paying more taxes on it than you did the year before.”

Hudson agreed, “Around COVID with supply chain issues, things going on, there was just this perfect storm that created what some would call a ‘funky market,’ or a ‘false market,’ and that actually put assessors in a position where if they were going to do their job according to state statute, many of them felt like they would have to be raising the assessed value of vehicles.”

The state statute to which Hudson refers dictates that assessors must use the October issue of the National Automobile Dealers Association’s (NADA) Used Car Guide to determine the value of a motor vehicle. Reedy’s bill would allow the State Tax Commission to designate a different nationally produced automobile guide to be used by assessors. His proposal would also establish a depreciation schedule to be applied to the values set forth in that automobile guide.

*Representative Brad Hudson (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)*

“It makes sure that these used vehicles depreciate in value for taxation purposes,” Reedy said.

Hudson said the issue of inflated vehicle valuations has the potential to negatively impact every household in Missouri.

“People from all over our state pay personal property taxes, and in many cases they pay a lot in personal property taxes, and they expect their taxes to go up when they get a new vehicle … but when they have the same vehicles, when those vehicles are older, when those vehicles have more miles on them, they don’t expect their taxes to go up because of their vehicles’ value, and they shouldn’t have to. It’s just common sense that these vehicles should be going down in value every year,” Hudson said.

Reedy said the problem hasn’t abated on its own the passage of time, “I can give you a case where a vehicle that had a value of $7,300 in 2021 went to $7,600 in 2022. Even now, in ’23 that same vehicle has just dropped back to $7,500, so [the owner of] that particular vehicle will pay more taxes in 2023 than [they] paid in 2021.”

Both lawmakers said this is exactly the kind of issue Missouri lawmakers should be addressing on behalf of their constituents.

“It is common sense. You have folks that are working, struggling to make ends meet, some of them on fixed incomes, they have to plan ahead, and then they get hit with a higher tax bill because of something that was beyond their control. No, that’s not right and that’s something that the Missouri legislature should be fixing,” said Hudson.

This year’s version of this legislation was passed out of the House 150-0 before stalling out in the Senate. In 2022, Hudson carried a version of the bill that cleared the House 146-0 but also did not clear the Senate.

Expired temp tags to phase out as vehicle dealers collect sales tax under new law

Many Missourians will be pleased to know that expired temporary license tags on vehicles could soon become a thing of the past, under one of the bills signed into law earlier this month.

*Representative Michael O’Donnell (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)*

Those tags have, for some, been a source of anger and fodder for jokes. Entire social media accounts have been dedicated to posting pictures of vehicles with tags that expired months or even years ago, and some openly ridicule law enforcement for not acting against drivers with outdated tags. For others the issue has been a source of anxiety as they felt the scrutiny of peers and law enforcement while driving with them.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Representative Michael O’Donnell (R-St. Louis) of the system now in place in Missouri – the system that would be changed as part of Senate Bill 398. “This [change] is long overdue … we’re only one of like three or four states that’s still doing it this way.”

The “way” to which O’Donnell refers is the collection of sales taxes on vehicle purchases by the Department of Revenue, after the sale.

“We had this weird situation in Missouri where people would go buy a car and unlike anything else you buy you don’t pay the sales tax when you buy it,” explained Representative Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis). “People get the best car they think they can afford. Next thing they know they go to get their plates for it, they find out they owe $4,000 or $5,000, or even $1,000 or $500 if they got a cheap, used car, it’s a lot of money at once in order to get their plates, and they go, ‘Well I can’t afford that.’”

O’Donnell was the House handler of the proposal that became part of SB 398 that will require auto dealers to collect sales tax at the time of a vehicle purchase.

“When [Missourians] go in to buy the car, the dealer’s going to bring it up. ‘The sales tax on a vehicle is this. Do you want to write a check for that or do you want to roll it into the financing?,’” said O’Donnell.

While having dealers begin collecting taxes at the time of purchase sounds like a simple change, Merideth said it took several years for infrastructural changes that will allow it.

“We’ve been saying for a long time that that’s the solution,” said Merideth, “and then the Department of Revenue would tell us, ‘We don’t have a technical system that can do that.’ What they told us is their computer systems that they were using were designed in the ‘80s when we barely had computers and hadn’t been updated.”

*Representative Peter Merideth (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications*)

A series of legislative and budgetary changes – some of which, notes Merideth, did not have the bipartisan support that this portion of SB 398 had – have allowed for this bill to advance and O’Donnell describes it as the last step in a long process. The new law becomes effective August 28but it allows several months for changes to Department of Revenue systems. O’Donnell said it could be 12 to 24 months before those buying vehicles experience the new system.

Many legislators in recent years have said that this issue was among those about which they most often heard complaints from constituents, but they often learned that increasing enforcement against those with expired tags was only going to hurt those who were already financially struggling and would not end the problem.

Merideth told House Communications, “This temp tag issue is the thing I have heard maybe second most from constituents about, second only to gun violence, of anything in my district. It shocked me how upset people are about it, but I get it. It feels like we have a situation where all these people are running around that aren’t paying their fair share of the taxes that the rest of us are paying.”

“I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘Well don’t buy the car if you can’t pay the taxes,’” said O’Donnell, but he, like Merideth and others, quickly learned that it wasn’t always that simple. He said a series of reports by a television reporter illustrated the depth of the problem. She talked to a number of Missourians who had expired temporary tags.

“A lot of people had hardship problems,” O’Donnell learned. “That was a lot of money to come up with, and she would ask the question, ‘If you were able to roll it into your financing and just pay $30 extra each month would that have been more doable,’ and people were like, ‘Oh my gosh, that would’ve been so much easier and so much less stressful.’”

O’Donnell also learned how anxious many of those drivers were because of their expired tags. “It wasn’t like it’s no big deal, nobody cares. They were always nervous that they were going to get pulled over and get questioned about it … [this legislation] will reduce that stress of thinking that the eyes of the world are upon you because you’ve got this temp tag.”

The end result was a much-needed change that lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle will be glad to talk about to their constituents.

Said Merideth, “I’m tired of seeing the expired temp tags and I’m tired of, honestly, hearing from so many people about the expired temp tags. It’s a frustrating problem and honestly I’m glad we’re finally going to collecting the revenue that we need to have and we’re going to do it in a way that people are going to know what they’re getting into when they buy their car.”

O’Donnell said four or five years from now there might still be some stragglers out there, but most expired tags should disappear over the next couple of years.

Production note: due to a technical issue, the audio from Rep. Merideth was not of good quality. Those who wish to access it may contact House Communications.

House bills would help Missourians with vehicle taxation, stem temp tag ‘abuse’

The House passed two bills this week that will help Missourians regarding the taxes they pay on vehicles. One would address a years-old issue regarding temporary license tags. The other would stem the hiking of property taxes on vehicles that are getting older with increasing mileage.

House Bill 415 could at last cut off the displaying by drivers of expired temporary tags – something that has been an issue in Missouri for years. It would require dealerships to collect sales tax at the time of a vehicle purchase, either as a lump sum or by rolling the tax into the financed amount. House Bill 713 would lay out how vehicles’ assessed valuations would be determined, replacing a system that has allowed property tax increases in the last two years.

St. Louis Republican Michael O’Donnell carries HB 415, which he says is the latest step in addressing the temporary tag issue. Under previous action by the General Assembly a new computer system is coming to the Department of Revenue that will allow the collection of sales tax by dealers. This bill would allow for its use beginning in January.

“There is no other thing that you purchase where you have to go someplace else to pay the sales tax. You buy a pen, you pay the sales tax at that point. [If this bill becomes law] you’re going to buy your car and you’re going to pay the sales tax when you buy it,” said O’Donnell.

He said the bill could also make car and truck purchases easier for Missourians by addressing what can now be a significant up-front cost.

“[It would] allow for the sales tax, if you’re interested, if you’re financing, to roll the sales tax into the financing if you would like that. For a lot of folks that becomes a more reasonable proposition because writing a check for $2,000 to pay the sales tax is a lot more difficult than adding $30 to your payments every month.”

Bipartisan backing gave the bill a 155-1 vote on its way to the Senate. Democrats including Peter Merideth (St. Louis) said it would be a fix that is “important,” and “overdue.”

“I actually hear more from constituents about this than many other things, strangely – about the expired tags, and frequently have to have the conversation with them that the main problem in Missouri is that we aren’t requiring dealers to collect the sales tax at the time of sale,” said Merideth. “So folks, either intentionally or not intentionally find themselves not getting their taxes paid and their licenses ready.”

O’Donnell said the passage of this legislation could eliminate “90%” of “temp tag abuse” in Missouri, and noted that 47 other states already allow dealers to collect tax at the time of the sale.

*Representative Roger Reedy (Photo: Tim Bommel, Missouri House Communications)*

The sponsor of HB 713, Rodger Reedy (R-Windsor) explained that each year Missouri assessors use the October edition of the National Automobile Dealers’ Association (NADA) Used Car Guide to determine the values of the vehicles on which Missourians pay property taxes. HB 713 would replace that with a system that begins with the original suggested retail price (MSRP) of each vehicle from when it was new, and apply a depreciation schedule for each year of its age up to 15 years. After that its value would be assessed at one-tenth of one percent.

Reedy said the old system’s flaws were made obvious in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

“In 2021 and ’22, due to used care values going up, our constituents and citizens had higher tax assessments and therefore paid higher taxes,” said Reedy. “When those values went up, there’s no provision for rollbacks on personal property, and when that happened our taxpayers just got a taxing increase and I’ve talked to several members [who have said] that that’s been a really big issue as they’ve talked to their constituents.”

He called the bill a, “taxpayer protection act. If there’s nothing else we can do, we can protect our taxpayers from unjustly having to pay more taxes on a vehicle that’s a year older that has more mileage. I just don’t think it’s right to do that to our taxpayers.”

That measure advanced to the Senate on the strength of a 150-0 vote.