<VV> MD MVA ARRGGH!

[Bill Elliott]

A few weeks ago I received in the mail a parking ticket from the City of Baltimore. What made this 
strange was neither my wife nor I had been in Baltimore during the time period of the ticket AND the tag 
number didn't match any car we owned. Though it did look a bit familiar...

In the interim, my wife totalled my Allante and I replaced it with an old BMW (which I've been running 
around on PA transit tags). Yesterday I finally got all the paperwork together (PA title from the dealer, 
MD safety inspection, Allante tags back from the insurance comapny, etc) so I made the trek to the MD 
MVA this morning.

First thing I did was to investigate why the state of MD thought this car in Baltimore belonged to me. 
Come to find out it was the 1967 Corvair (47k, AC/PG/posi/coupe/SS rims/Carerra shocks/NOS 
heads/forged pistons/new rings/rods and fresh cylinders in the trunk) that I sold... in June 1997!!!  

(Remember I moved to Wisconsin in late 1997 and didn't return here until 2003)

The buyer had never put the title in his name and had (apparently) been driving around on my tags 
(which expired before I sold the car in 1997)! (Remember, this was a parking ticket, so the car is being 
driven!) Interesting though... the DMV showed the tags expired in 1999, meaning he somehow got them 
renewed (in my name) at least once.  A good lesson to return tags even if they're expired.  

The DMV was able to dissociate the tags from my name (so no parking tickets based on them would 
come to me), but since the VIN was still in my name, it could pop back up. They then suggested that 
maybe I wanted them to print out a replacement title for the car so that I could go to Baltimore and 
retrieve it! (It's a bad area of Baltimore...not sure it's worth it...)

So then I get to transferring the tags off the Allante to the BMW. The insurance company didn't return 
the registration along with the tags. These tags had just been renewed in September for 24 months, so 
there was a lot of financial motivation to transfer vice getting new tags. However, since I didn't have the 
registration card, I had to go to another office to have them print out a new card for me. The tags which I 
just renewed 45 days ago WERE NOT IN THE SYSTEM!!! That's right... tags that expired in 1997 were 
still coming back to haunt me, but tags 45 days old were not in their system. 

So I had to eat at least 12 months of registration (possibly I'll get a 12 month refund) AND got to spend 
2+ hours at the DMV (when the whole process should have taken 30 minutes.)

So I'm just venting... unless anyone wants to venture into Baltimore and pick up a '67 Monza... I have the 
street address where it was illegally parked... ;-)

Bill Elliott