By Rex Santus

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

(January 28, 2013) — Columbus — Ohio motorists would have to pay $10 every seven years and replace their license plates under a budget proposal from the Department of Public Safety.

Under the same proposal, the Motor Vehicle Bureau would recall red-white-blue bicentennial plates — and the older gold-tinted plates — in December 2013.

Currently, drivers are required to replace plates only when letters and numbers become “unreadable, or when the state determines that the plates are no longer viable,” said Joe Andrews, director of communications for the department.

The changes are included in the Public Safety Department’s budget request to Gov. John Kasich. The governor will unveil his budget proposal Feb. 4. The fees for plate renewals would bring $5 million a year into state coffers for fiscal years 2014 and 2015.

In a letter to Kasich, Public Safety Director Thomas Charles said he is proposing the seven-year limit on plates to address concerns by law enforcement agencies about the difficulty of reading rusted and faded letters and numbers.

The letter does not say how many plates will be recalled at the end of the year. But the letter states that drivers would need to pay another, unspecified fee to keep their old combination of letters and numbers or to obtain specialty plates.

In 2011, the last year for which numbers are available, Ohio had 12 million vehicle registrations. Of those, 765,000 were specialty plates.

Contact Rex Santus at [email protected].