By C.J. Garbo | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
There is something almost perfectly governmental about Colorado’s growing obsession with expired license plates.
First, make an unavoidable part of ordinary life increasingly expensive.
Then act surprised when more people struggle to pay for it.
Then impose late fees on the people who fall behind.
Then send police out to fine them again.
And finally, call the whole thing “compliance.”
Across Colorado, law enforcement agencies have been escalating their efforts against motorists with expired registrations. Denver has conducted repeated enforcement campaigns. Colorado Springs and surrounding agencies have organized regional crackdowns. Police departments speak of zero tolerance. Drivers can face registration costs, accumulated late fees, traffic citations and, in some circumstances, towing.
The reflexive response is simple enough: Pay your registration on time.
Legally, that is correct.
As public policy, it avoids the more interesting question.
Why are so many Coloradans failing to do it?
The state’s own numbers deserve attention.
Colorado collected approximately $33.2 million in late vehicle-registration fees in fiscal year 2021-22. By FY 2022-23, the number was $36.3 million. In FY 2023-24, it reached $43.5 million. In FY 2024-25, it hit a record $45.1 million.
That is an increase of roughly 36 percent in three years.
The Governor’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting expects late-registration revenue to keep climbing, projecting $45.7 million in FY 2025-26, $46.6 million in FY 2026-27 and $47.1 million in FY 2027-28. The office attributes the expected increase in part to broader cost pressures that may lead more Coloradans to delay vehicle registration.
Those figures require some intellectual honesty.
They do not prove that the number of delinquent motorists increased by 36 percent. Colorado changed its laws in 2022 to capture additional late fees and back registration charges, including removing a late-fee exemption associated with temporary registrations. Part of the revenue increase therefore results from government expanding what it collects.
But that hardly makes the story better.
It actually helps explain it.
Colorado had a problem with motorists failing to keep registrations current. Its response was to collect more money from them.
And apparently the problem remains.
Colorado Springs police wrote 409 expired-plate tickets during one seven-day enforcement campaign in April 2025. Denver has conducted multiple special enforcement periods since July 2024. During one month-long Denver campaign, officers issued 656 registration citations. More than 1,600 vehicles were reportedly ticketed for expired plates at Denver International Airport in March 2025.
By April 2026, Colorado Springs police, the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, Colorado State Patrol and several municipal agencies were conducting another coordinated registration-enforcement surge. Authorities announced “zero-tolerance” enforcement and warned that vehicles displaying fictitious plates or registrations expired by more than a year could be impounded.
One can reasonably support enforcement of vehicle-registration laws while still asking why noncompliance has become significant enough to require recurring multi-agency crackdowns.
Perhaps the problem is not simply that Coloradans suddenly became irresponsible.
Perhaps government should look at the bill.
The Price of Permission
What Coloradans casually call “registration” is not one charge.
It is a stack.
There is the registration fee. There is the Specific Ownership Tax. There are weight-based charges. There is a Road Safety Surcharge. There is a Bridge Safety Surcharge. There are administrative and program-specific fees. Electric vehicles face additional charges. Counties and particular plate selections can add still more.
The Bridge Safety Surcharge alone ranges from $13 to $32 based on vehicle weight and generates approximately $100 million annually, according to CDOT.
The Road Safety Surcharge normally ranges from $16 to $39 per vehicle. It was created through the 2009 FASTER legislation, which established or increased an assortment of vehicle fees, fines and surcharges to produce transportation revenue. CDOT says FASTER generates roughly $200 million annually for state transportation projects, plus additional money for city and county roads.
Colorado has become particularly skilled at calling compulsory government exactions “fees.”
There is a legal distinction between a tax and a fee, and that distinction matters under Colorado law. It matters especially because TABOR generally requires voter approval for new taxes.
But families do not balance their checkbooks using constitutional jurisprudence.
A dollar extracted by government is a dollar the family no longer has.
Call it a tax.
Call it a surcharge.
Call it an impact fee.
Call it a road-usage fee.
Call it an enterprise charge.
The grocery store does not care what the legislature called it.
Neither does the mortgage company.
Colorado’s 2021 transportation legislation provides a particularly revealing example. Senate Bill 21-260 created new transportation enterprises and an array of new revenue mechanisms. The General Assembly specifically declared certain assessments to be fees rather than taxes and structured the enterprises accordingly. The legislation was not referred to voters. Litigation challenging that structure followed, and the Colorado Court of Appeals ultimately upheld it.
The arrangement may satisfy the legal definition of a fee.
That does not make the money free.
Government Cannot Ignore Price
This is where Colorado’s registration crackdown becomes more than a story about license plates.
It becomes a lesson in government incentives.
When a private business raises the price of something and customers stop buying it, management has to confront the price.
Government possesses another option.
It can make purchasing mandatory.
And when someone still cannot pay, government can penalize him for failing to purchase it.
Colorado charges a motorist to register a vehicle. If he cannot pay on time, the state adds $25 for each month or portion of a month that registration remains delinquent, up to $100. The motorist can also owe prorated back taxes and registration fees.
Then law enforcement can issue a separate citation.
In Denver, that citation has been $95.
Think about the economics of that system.
A person does not have enough money to satisfy the government’s original demand.
Government’s solution is to demand more money.
If he still cannot satisfy the government, another arm of government stops him and demands still more.
This is not an argument for eliminating vehicle registration. Roads must be funded. Vehicles need identifiable owners. Law enforcement has legitimate reasons to care about fictitious plates, uninsured motorists and vehicles intentionally concealed from registration systems.
It is an argument for remembering that public policy has consequences.
Government does not get to impose the cost and then pretend it had nothing to do with the response.
These Are Working People
There is another uncomfortable reality here.
The person driving with an expired tag is not necessarily driving because he is taking a Sunday joyride.
He may be driving because he has to work.
Outside Colorado’s densest urban areas, an automobile is effectively a prerequisite for participation in the economy. People drive to jobs. They drive children to school and child care. They drive to medical appointments. They buy groceries. They care for aging parents.
For millions of Americans, “just don’t drive until you can afford the registration” is not serious advice.
And Colorado households are already under pressure.
United For ALICE’s analysis of 2024 data found that 36 percent of Colorado households were either below the federal poverty level or earned more than the poverty level but still could not afford the basic costs of living where they reside.
That represents 877,084 Colorado households.
These are not all unemployed households. ALICE literally stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
They work.
They simply do not have enough money to comfortably absorb housing, food, child care, health care, transportation, technology and taxes.
Transportation is one of the basic expenses measured for a reason.
Colorado’s own General Assembly has already acknowledged the problem. When lawmakers temporarily reduced transportation charges in 2022, the legislation expressly declared that reducing what motorists pay for registration would “reduce the financial stress many Coloradans face.”
Read that again.
The government understands that its registration charges cause financial stress.
Yet when a financially stressed Coloradan falls behind on those charges, the government’s answer is a late fee.
Then a citation.
Potentially a tow.
Eventually, another enforcement campaign.
Government Creates a Burden, Then Punishes the Burdened
This pattern extends far beyond license plates.
Government creates a mandate.
Government attaches a cost.
Government increases the cost.
Citizens change their behavior because people respond to economic incentives and financial constraints.
Government observes the resulting behavior as a compliance problem.
Then government spends more money enforcing the mandate and imposes additional financial penalties upon those least capable of absorbing the original cost.
At no point does the institution seriously consider whether it helped create the problem it is now policing.
That is the part Colorado’s expired-tag conversation is missing.
It is easy to photograph a car with a two-year-old sticker and become irritated. I understand the irritation. The motorist who paid hundreds of dollars to comply understandably resents the person who did not.
But directing that frustration exclusively toward the delinquent motorist lets the government that designed the system escape scrutiny.
Ask another question.
How expensive should government make legal participation in ordinary life?
And when compliance deteriorates, at what point should policymakers examine the price rather than simply increasing the punishment?
The answer cannot always be another fee.
Colorado’s own revenue numbers should make policymakers curious. The state collected a record $45.1 million in late-registration fees in a single fiscal year.
Government looks at that number and sees revenue.
I see something else.
I see millions of instances in which Coloradans were late satisfying a government financial obligation.
Some undoubtedly procrastinated. Some ignored the law. Some made a calculated decision that they could get away with it.
But anyone who believes every expired tag represents laziness or contempt for the law has never watched a working family decide which bill gets paid Friday and which one waits until the next paycheck.
The Legislature Should Go First
Colorado does not need to choose between enforcing its laws and making those laws reasonable.
Do both.
Enforce fraudulent and fictitious plates aggressively. Address uninsured motorists. Deal with people deliberately evading registration for years.
But the General Assembly should also conduct a complete audit of the taxes, surcharges and compulsory fees imposed upon ordinary passenger vehicles.
Publish the total.
Show Coloradans where every dollar goes.
Identify which charges were approved directly by voters and which were imposed legislatively or through government enterprises.
Then start eliminating them.
The goal should be simple: make basic vehicle registration inexpensive enough that paying it on time is the easiest decision a motorist makes that month.
That would produce something government claims to want: compliance.
Instead, Colorado too often follows a different formula.
Raise the cost.
Observe the noncompliance.
Increase the penalty.
Intensify enforcement.
Collect the revenue.
Repeat.
That is not solving a problem.
That is monetizing one.
Colorado made registration more expensive. Now it punishes drivers who fall behind.And before Colorado sends another squad of officers onto the streets looking for people who have not paid the government enough money to drive to work, perhaps the people under the Gold Dome should ask whether government has made the price of obeying government unnecessarily expensive in the first place.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.