A Nevada license plate that was recalled for its message telling Californians to return to the Golden State is fighting its way through the courts to get back on the road.
According to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, the personalized license plate, which read “GOBK2CA,” short for return to California, was removed in May after someone filed a complaint with the agency.
The owner of the vehicle, identified in local reports as Adam Steelmon, is appealing the decision and will appear in court on Wednesday.
Steelmon could not be reached for comment.
Steelmon posted a photo of the license plate on Facebook, where it received more than 80,000 likes, he told KOLO-TV in Reno. About a week later, DMV officials approached him to tell him they were revoking the plate, he said.
“I get a letter from the DMV saying, 'We don't think we like your plates,' and here's a letter saying we're taking them down,” Steelmon told KOLO-8.
He said he had no problems with the DMV for the past two decades.
The license plate is believed to conflict with a state law that prohibits making defamatory comments about a person or group, said DMV spokesman Eli Rohl.
“In this case, the smeared group is Californians,” Rohl said. “If we have been denying applications for other 'return to California' plates, then it is not an equal application of the law to receive a complaint about this plate and not take action on it.”
Personalized license plates that are flagged as suspicious are reviewed by a select committee within the DMV to determine if they violate the statute, said Rohl, who sits on the committee. All it takes is one complaint for a license plate to be reviewed.
“Sometimes we find that a complaint is unfounded and no action is taken; however, this is rare,” Rohl said. “More often than not, a complaint comes in about a plate that we made a mistake in approving in the first place.”
The committee considers the context in the motorist's initial reasoning and in the complaint to determine whether it is a “simple misunderstanding or whether the complaint sheds new light on something we had not considered before,” he added.
The panel reviewed more than 700 applications for personalized license plates from July of last year through March, KLAS-TV in Las Vegas reported. Among those rejected for being derogatory or profane were “HOLSHT” and “U 1D1OT.”
