City to begin selling vehicle stickers year-round
BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter fspielman@suntimes.com April 10, 2013 12:00PM
2013-2014 Chicago city sticker image
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Updated: April 11, 2013 2:23AM
Chicago motorists will no longer be forced to face long lines at the city clerk’s office to purchase their city vehicle stickers, thanks to a long-awaited overhaul approved Wednesday.
The City Council approved City Clerk Susana Mendoza’s plan to start selling city stickers on a year-round basis in 2014.
The transition will follow an exhaustive education campaign to gather vehicle identification numbers from 1.3 million Chicago motorists. After that, motorists will be assigned a new sticker expiration date that’s six months after their state license plates expire.
In 2014, motorists will be forced to make a choice: purchase a pro-rated city sticker that carries them anywhere from one-to-11 months until their new exipiration date or shell out even more money to be rid of the annual sticker headache for longer than a year.
Either way, Mendoza told the City Council that long lines at City Hall will be a thing of the past.
“It’s time to stop doing business the way it’s always been done,” she said Wednesday.
“I’m not kidding when I tell you that people have had to take a day off from work to purchase their city stickers. That’s unacceptable.”
The switch to year-round sales — and the change to a no-nonsense sticker design that’s easy to enforce — allowed Mendoza to rid herself of the political headache caused by the annual contest to design the city sticker.
Last year’s design was pulled after it was tied to a gang controversy.
