Planned plates to hail dam

Anticipated revenue to fund tourism efforts

Thanks to the Boulder City Chamber of Commerce, Hoover Dam again will be immortalized, this time in a Nevada specialty license plate.

The chamber received approval on Oct. 18 from the State Commission on Special License Plates for its plate, designed to bring revenue to the chamber so it can fund tourism efforts primarily targeting the Las Vegas Valley.

"I'm so excited," chamber executive director Jill Lagan said the day after the approval. "The first 200 plates are at our disposal, so we might auction them off. I know the mayor really, really wants 0001."

After gathering the requisite 1,000 signatures to show adequate public interest and then receiving approval, the Boulder City-Hoover Dam plates still have a long road to travel before the first one is distributed.

The chamber's first task is to meet with the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to revise the proposed background for the plate. The prototype included a picture of Hoover Dam centered between the walls of Black Canyon running the full width of the plate.

"They had already told us that we'd need to re-do the picture," Lagan said. "We'll have to squish the dam into the left side third of the plate so the numbers can go on the right two-thirds."

She said since the state requires blue and silver as the two primary colors, the numbered background would be silver, while the lettering would be in blue.

Once the design is revised, prototypes are mounted on Nevada Highway Patrol cars for testing of readability. After that, it's up to the director of DMV to approve the plate and release it for production.

Assuming the plate is produced and offered for sale, it's up to 1,000 motorists to keep buying or renewing it or else production will cease.

For newly issued plates, a $61 fee applies, of which the chamber will receive $25. For plate renewals, the fee is $30, with the chamber getting $20 of that sum.

For each 1,000 new plates issued, the chamber would receive $25,000, and for 1,000 renewals, it would get $20,000.

The money would be used to pitch Boulder City and all it has to offer to other Southern Nevadans, since the grant funds received from the Nevada Commission on Tourism restricts the marketing of the city within a 100-mile radius.

A chart prepared for the commission's first meeting, this past January, showed there were 58,069 active specialty plates being used in Nevada, which generated $3.94 million in revenue. The two largest sellers were the Lake Tahoe plate, with 18,135 active plates generating $2.18 million, and the Las Vegas Centennial plate, sported by 16,643 vehicles and bringing in $460,262. The least used plate was for Mount Charleston, with 74 issued which generated $1,675.

The eight-member commission, which consists of three state assemblymen, two state senators and the state directors of DMV, Cultural Affairs and Public Safety, was created in 2003 in order to stem the myriad of license plate requests made to the Legislature by special interest groups.


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