Earlier this week, I was driving through inner Southeast Portland when I spotted a city of Portland work vehicle with California license plates. How puzzling! Why would one of our local resources be registered to our neighbors to the south? —Teddy Love
Even more puzzling is how unconcerned that resource appears to be about following the law. When chumps like you and me wind up with a car that has out-of-state plates (whether we bought it that way or brought it with us in a recent move), we have just 30 days to outfit our vehicle with Oregon tags, which costs hundreds of dollars and usually involves throwing away old tags with months of perfectly good not-being-expiredness left in them.
Granted, this 30-day requirement isn’t exactly the most relentlessly enforced provision in Oregon’s traffic code. Still, you’d think that if anyone were going to obey this rule, city government would. Is Portland flouting state law deliberately, and if so, how are they getting away with it? We know cops tend not to ticket other cops. Perhaps, similarly, the city knows it can offend with impunity because there’s some shadowy, unspoken rule (probably originating with the Knights Templar) that bureaucracies must never direct their pettifogging at other bureaucracies. None dare call it conspiracy!…