Originally Posted by Noel e. Oman, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Thursday, July 24, 2008
LITTLE ROCK — Nearly 1,000 license plates have been pulled from a state revenue office after a vehicle owner complained the letters on the license plate suggested a racial epithet.
Alice Kunce of North Little Rock said the sequence of letters on the plate she was issued at a local revenue office - NGR - struck her as offensive.
“I can’t put that on my car,” Kunce said. “What kind of message would that send?”
Officials at the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration had no problem pulling 981 plates from further circulation even though it may have been a first. Each regular Arkansas license plate costs the state $1.46.
“We want nothing derogatory or inflammatory on our license plates,” Roger Duren, who heads the agency’s Office of Motor Vehicle, said Wednesday. “This may be one that got by us.”
The state typically purchasesbetween 300,000 and 400,000 license plates a year under a contract with Waldale Manufacturing Ltd. of Amherst, Nova Scotia. Waldale bills itself as the largest private license plate manufacturer in North America. It produces more than 500 types ofplates for 16 provinces or states in seven nations, according to the company’s Web site.
The state has almost 2 million registered passenger vehicles. People pick up plates when they register a new car.
Waldale and a state employee review each license plate series before the license plates are produced to ensure that the letter sequence isn’t inappropriate, Duren said. No plate contains the letters Q , U or V. For law enforcement purposes, Q’s might get mixed up with O’s, Duren said. The same goes for U’s and V’s.
Each license plate series is produced in increments of 999, he said. Kunce picked up the license plate, 018-NGR, on Tuesday afternoon, meaning 17 plates already had been distributed.
“There are some that are out there,” Duren said Wednesday. “We decided not to issue any more. We certainly don’t want anybody to be offended.”
Kunce said she may have made the connection with the sequence of letters and a derogatory term for blacks because of her background as a middleschool teacher.
“My mind is trained to think in different ways,” she said.
The state used the NGR sequence on 1988 plates when theletters preceded the numbers, Duren said. “No one noticed it then.”
Waldale officials also said they have used the same sequence of letters on plates in other states, Duren said.
But 20 years ago was a different era, said Kunce, who was 4 years old in 1988.
“Maybe we’re a little more sensitive now, for better or worse, with this sort of thing,” she said.
And anyone who has seen the plate has had a similar reaction to Kunce, who showed it to patrons and employees of the revenue office on Tuesday and at school on Wednesday.
“Everybody looked at it for a minute and got it,” Kunce said in an interview. “It wasn’t just me.”
Kunce was told she could purchase a new plate for $1.25.
“I’m supposed to be able to pick one up [today],” she said.
Kunce and her fiance moved to the area from Missouri about a year ago and are only now getting plates because her Missouri registration remains current.
“My fiance and I are happy here, but this is not quite the welcome I was expecting,” she said.
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