Posted on 04/17/2004 8:04:53 AM PDT by Jim Noble
LAWRENCE -- In the long battle to keep city residents from illegally registering their cars in New Hampshire, police here relied on a potent ally this week, the guy next door.
One night this week, police officers slapped 57 drivers with $500 fines for living in Lawrence but owning cars with New Hampshire license plates.
Some of the cars were towed away, requiring their owners to pay even more to retrieve them from a gravel lot surrounded by a chain-link fence.
In a city where car insurance rates are notoriously high, it was the most dramatic strike yet against drivers who seek to save money by registering their cars in New Hampshire, a state where insurance is not required.On top of the $500 ticket, owners had to pay a minimum of $90, plus daily storage fees, to get their vehicles back. Another 34 cars -- which the city couldn't tow, because they were in private driveways -- received $500 tickets.
One of the vehicles towed was a van that Aaron Wedgwood, a New Hampshire resident, bought for his retired father, who lives in Lawrence. His father lives on $1,300-a-month Social Security checks, he said, and can't afford local insurance rates.
But his father also has health problems and needs a car to drive to regular doctors' appointments, Wedgwood said.
"I think it's just crazy, because I'm not trying to beat the system," Wedgwood said. "It's my father, and I have to take care of him."
Residents registering their cars across state lines are a perennial problem in border towns. Unlike Massachusetts, New Hampshire doesn't require drivers to buy auto insurance to register their cars.
If owners insure their vehicles, the rates are usually cheaper in New Hampshire, and drivers do not have to pay local excise taxes for the vehicles they own, as they must in Massachusetts. Some of the drivers who picked up their cars had Massachusetts drivers' licenses, said Bob Sheehan, owner of the garage that towed the cars this week. A few asked whether the police would be towing again that night.
Ed Anderson, founder of the South Common Central Neighborhood Association, said residents who register their cars properly and pay for insurance are angry at neighbors who do not.
"I think there's a fear if somebody [without insurance] hits you that your insurance is going to have to pay for it," he said. "I think there's a bit of anger."
Methuen has grappled with similar problems, said Police Chief Joseph E. Solomon. But because most residents have driveways, police rarely tow the offending cars. Instead, officers on the overnight shift who have checked cars with New Hampshire plates for 30 days often leave court summonses for owners.
Methuen police let judges decide whether or how much to fine owners of improperly registered cars, he said. As in Lawrence, he said, police are often tipped off to cars with New Hampshire plates.
"The neighbors," he said, "know it all."
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Live Free or Die.
If you live on a couple of miles from the New Hampsire border, why in the hell haven't you moved out of the Peoples' Republic of Taxachusetts? I can understand if you have a job in Boston not wanting to commute from NH, but if you live in Lawrence you only have to move a short distance to escape form Kennedy's Inferno.
But the welfare's no good up here-you hafta work for it.
Note that taxachusetts also has much higher taxes, but can not even provide enough police to reduce auto theft & insurance fraud.
At least parts of Kali aren't RAT-infested, and I like the climate. Mass has neither of these things going for it. Maybe we have a new candidate for maximum slime-pit.
Is the local municipality going to be passing out brown shirts now to all the "good samaritans?"
These are the types of houses that suffered from night time 'good clean fun' in the neighborhood that I grew up in!
You can't! That's why I hate the police and the justice system. It feeds its own. Truth is no longer the primary factor in our court/judicial system these days. Procedure and "the system" trumps it in spades. Doesn't matter what the truth is, you'd better pray that "the judge is in the 'proper/good' mood that day."
I hope to high heaven that I never, ever, ever have to rely on the police who I swear are getting stupider by the year now. Sorry to the handful of you who are honest, truthful, and have a set of principles and morals that you live by, but most don't. Yes, most!
And all the people who blew the whistle on these people's lives are better off now, how...?The police have learned to keep the identities of their snitc....errrr...."good citizens" very secret, so that things like words written in Round-Up on their front lawns or dog clinton pushed down their dryer vents don't happen.Is the local municipality going to be passing out brown shirts now to all the "good samaritans?"
These are the types of houses that suffered from night time 'good clean fun' in the neighborhood that I grew up in!
-Eric
No such luck. There's no revenue enhancement in that - only hard work and doing your Constitutional duty!
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