A New Year, A Number Of New License Plate Designs

Those who say “variety is the spice of life” should be very happy with the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
Gone are the days of one-look-fits-all when it comes to license plates for Nebraskans.
On Friday, Antelope County Treasurer Deb Branstiter showed off the variety of new plate designs for residents in the county in 2017.
“We have approximately 10,000 plates in total in our office,” Branstiter said. The plates fill the shelving in the office, just waiting for their new owners. They were delivered by inmates (and their guard) from the Tecumseh Penitentiary in late 2016.
Replacing the standard meadowlark and goldenrod design for passenger vehicles is a blue and gold Sower plate. The Sower appears as a light blue/gray watermark behind the numbers. Also, a silhouette of the state serves as the dash between the county number and the individual digits. The blue and gold represent the state flag colors.
In addition to the passenger vehicle plate, there are new plates for farm and commercial trucks. Branstiter explained a subtle but important difference between the truck and passenger plates that begins after the county number.

“The passenger plates start with a letter,” she said. Farm and commercial plates have their letters following the numerals. “The farm plates have an R, S and T. For commercial trucks, we have (the letters) A, B and D.”
As always, the standard plates can be made into vanity plates if the word is available and acceptable.
This year, a host of specialty plates are the big story.
“More and more organizations have plates,” Branstiter said. She attributed that to the fact that the DMV has lowered the number of people required to request a specific-themed plate from 500 to 250.
The new specialty plates are Nebraska Serious Injury and Line-of-Duty Death Response Team, Husker, Creighton University, University of Omaha, Union Pacific, Nebraska Cattlemans, Nebraska Corn Growers, Ducks Unlimited, Mountain Lion, Breast Cancer Awareness and six variations of the Nebraska Military Honors license plate. Those variations allow for veterans to have the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines, National Guard or Navy prominently featured on their plate. All except the Breast Cancer Awareness plate have an additional fee.
“I’m very excited about having these plates available,” Branstiter said about the Military Honors license plate. She explained that those plates are not in stock at the county office since they are created upon request. Veterans applying for the plates must be registered with the Nebraska Department of Veteran’s Affairs Veteran’s Registry. She said those needing to register can do so at the veteran’s office in the county courthouse. A message/personalized military plate has a $40 fee and the regular numeric military plate has a $5 fee. Of those fees, $30 (of the $40) goes to the Nebraska Veteran Cemetery Fund and $10 goes to the Military Honor Fund. All of the $5 fee for the numeric plate goes to the Nebraska Veteran Cemetery Fund. For the organizational plates listed above, $10.50 of the $70 fee goes directly back to the sponsoring organization.