By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews
A mini-tsunami of Oregon coast-themed license plates extolling the virtues of puffins, sharks and Dungeness crabs is fast washing ashore.
The groups sponsoring the new plates are taking pre-orders and must sell at least 3,000 vouchers each before the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles will launch the manufacturing process.
If successful, their offerings would join the 16 other specialty plates that the state has authorized since the popular salmon-themed plate was issued 27 years ago.
And, more importantly, would help their respective organizations spread their messages while tapping into what can be a valuable stream of income to support critical programs.
But first, there is all that competition to deal with from other specialty plates currently in the formulation and sales process.
“It’s a shame they are all coming out at the same time,” Crystal Adams, executive director of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission told YachatsNews. “But we have all worked very long hours to put these plans together and there is really no reason to wait.”
The Coos Bay-based commission currently is selling $40 vouchers for a specialty plate featuring a bright-orange Dungeness crab against a light-blue sea background.
The goal, Adams said, is to raise enough money to keep crabs as a state-managed fishery.
“We don’t want to see it go to a federally managed fishery, which has happened with so many other fisheries in the world,” she said.
The commission’s plate may have the advantage of being the most visible, Adams added.
“With our plate, if you are four car lengths away, you’ll be able to tell it’s a Dungeness crab,” she said. “The others are pretty hard to see.”
Although pre-sales have just started, business proved brisk at two recent seafood festivals the commission attended.
“We got back in the office and had 131 emails in our inbox,” she said. “And every one of those is for a license plate.”
OSU sharks, aquarium puffins
Oregon State University’s Big Fish Lab this month began floating a “Vibrant Ocean” plate, which features three shark species commonly found in the waters off the coast.
Project backers say that proceeds from the plate could go a long way toward both financing future shark research and educating the public about the role these so-called “apex predators” play in the Oregon’s coastal marine ecosystem.
“Funding shark research is hard,” Taylor Chapple, an assistant professor and founder of the Big Fish Lab, said in a university news release. “Sharks are not delicious or cuddly but they’re critically important.”
The plate itself was designed by Natalie Donato, a third-year OSU Honors College undergraduate student from Folsom, Calif.
“The cherry on top of the already sweet situation,” she said, “is that the design supports research that I’m also invested in.”
The Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport started eyeing a specialty plate two years ago, with the notion of choosing an animal not already spoken for by actual or proposed plates featuring salmon, sharks, gray whales and sea otters.
Project leaders came up with tufted puffins, colorful sea birds that draw sizable crowds each year to breeding grounds at Haystack Rock and other locations.
“We were really purposeful not to get in the way of our partners,” said Jeremy Burke, the aquarium’s marketing director. “But we also figured that puffins might be a species that need more attention. They are really stunning.”
The design they chose shows a puffin not on the ground or in the air, but underwater, where they really excel, Burke said.
“When they are underwater, they look like they’re flying,” he said. “So fast and so agile. On land, they waddle when they walk and fly pretty awkwardly.”
About 1,900 pre-sale vouchers have already been snapped up at the mandatory $40 each. Of that, $35 is retained by the seller.
In the aquarium’s case, a successful specialty plate offering will help finance its fledgling marine wildlife rehabilitation building, which broke ground three months ago.
“We launched our sales effort at the end of June last year,” Burke said. “By the end of July, we’d sold 1,200 vouchers and have averaged 100 a month since then. It’s hard to know exactly when we’ll hit 3,000, but we are doing everything we can to get the word out.”
The way it works
Statewide, the number of requests for information received annually by the DMV regarding specialty plates is usually very different from the actual number that are received, said Chris Crabb, the transportation department’s public information officer.
The time it takes to act on an application also varies widely. Some groups may take a full year to submit an application, while others may need only a couple of weeks.
It often hinges on whether they have a clear idea for their plate design, and if they’ve already engaged an artist to design it, she said.
Only once has a group formally applied for a plate and begun voucher sales, only to declare defeat when they are unable to meet the minimum of 3,000. That happened several years ago, when the Willamette Animal Guild fell victim to wildly successful competition from the Oregon Wildlife Foundation and Smokey Bear who, year in and year out, remains in the top three for specialty plate issuances.
Still, most Oregon residents opt for the basic “tree” plate, with only about 10 percent of the vehicle-owning population being willing to shell out the extra money for a special background plate, Crabb said. That statistic has held steady ever since the state introduced special registration plates in 1998.
The first coastal effort
Bruce Mate, a professor emeritus in OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute in Newport, knows first-hand the challenges of ushering a specialty plate from conception to completion.
It took Mate and his colleagues three sessions of the Oregon Legislature – that’s six years total – to win approval from the Transportation Committee to begin the voucher process for a plate commemorating gray whales.
Up until that time, the committee was in the habit of making its own recommendations for what merited its own new specialty plate. Perhaps because artistic creativity wasn’t the committee’s strong suit, however, sizable stacks of unsold plates began piling up.
“The idea for new custom plates had a black eye for that,” Mate said. “But we finally won approval for a gray whale plate and the idea really took off.”
The competition surrounding the process never fades away, he said, because motorists still need to renew their registrations every two years. And at least 2,000 of them need to reauthorize their gray whale plates to maintain the institute’s funding stream.
“With all of these plates, people across the state are helping support and preserve important research about the coast,” Mate said. “People take pride in being coastal residents and this is one important way they can show that.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews and can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com
My favorite is still just plain old yellow and blue Pacific Wonderland. I got one the first thing I moved back to my native Oregon after 40 years out of state.