March Madness hits House floor with competing car tags
The Colorado House didn’t wait on March to go mad. The 65 lawmakers have been busting brackets for week on which is Colorado’s favorite speciality car tags.
House members cross party lines to vote for their favorites at the end of each day’s work in the chamber.
And like the NCAA Tournament itself, there have been the usual Goliaths crushing Davids – the U.S. Marines over Western State College, the Colorado Avalanche over the Carbon Fund – and there have been some upsets.
The 10th Mountain Division topped Support the Troops, and in Adopt a Shelter Pet bit the Boy Scouts and CSU Pueblo bounced the Denver Nuggets.
The contest is named the Speaker Mark Ferrandino Colorado License Plate Tournament, because the former Democratic leader from Denver had a thing about the proliferation of plates.
“I was here for eight years and never once did we kill a license plate bill, despite my best efforts,” Ferrandino said in 2015 as part of an April Fool’s gag that involved accusing the Senate of inadvertently killing the state budget bill.
The idea came the right, the brainchild of Aaron Yates, the deputy communications director for the House Republicans.
“We were talking about how many license plates there are introduced every session and how many there are on the books, and thought why not have some fun with it,” Yates said .
Not counting personalized plates, Colorado has 123 different kinds of tags, including 38 for the military, 13 for colleges, 36 groups and 36 “other” tags that include plates for state House and Senate as well as their congressional counterparts.
The Department of Motor Vehicles has information about getting a specialty plate available on its website. Some have one-time fees and others require donations to a specific charity.
The most popular speciality plate on the road as of Jan. 31?
The top 10 according to the Department of Revenue: