JACKSON, Miss. – If your pesky inspection sticker on your car is not up to date, you could be shelling out about $125 to pay for a ticket. A bill that would have gotten rid of inspection stickers passed in the Mississippi House during the last legislative session, but it failed in the Senate.
Representative Cecil Brown authored the bill and says he plans to introduce the bill again during the next legislative session. He believes inspection stickers are an unnesseary tax on consumers and he believes dealers are getting out of the business because they can lose money on providing the service.
“They are supposed to be a safety purposes, but anybody who has had his or her car inspected understands that right now you basically honk your horn, turn on your lights, make sure your blinkers are working, step on your breaks, and that’s essentially it. There are a lot of safety features on automobiles that are not being inspected now,” said Brown.
“It is just not accomplishing its original purpose in terms of providing real safety inspections for automobiles. We either need to provide full safety inspections for automobiles or get rid of it.”
Inspection stickers also cost the state money. The state only gets back about two dollars for every $7.68 spent on a sticker, since inspections cost five dollars and three dollars goes to the mechanic.
Neighboring states Alabama and Arkansas have already done away with inspection stickers.
