Pennsylvania's Department of Motor Vehicles will no longer send license plate registration stickers.

It's a savings for the state but will cause problems for local police departments.The decision was made based upon the results of a Penn State University study, which showed that eliminating the sticker had no impact on registration compliance.In order to ensure valid registration, police vehicles will all have access to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation database.This move will save taxpayers about $1.1 million a year, as well as $2 million in mailing costs for the government - but some challenge the act for prioritizing minor savings over efficient policing."I don't consider that to be wasteful spending when you're trying to enforce the law," state Rep. Jerry Knowles, R-124th, said. "It makes it more difficult."PennDOT is encouraging local police departments to consider purchasing electronic license plate readers, which can automatically scan a plate and determine registration status, along with a number of other issues.The price point for the readers is a major hindrance - they come at about $18,000 each, along with a $1,500 annual maintenance fee - especially for departments with a limited budget."The cost per reader, per car is going to make it unreasonable for us to get them for all of our cars," Lehighton police chief Brian Biechy said."Would it be nice to have them? Absolutely. However, to go about enforcing the registration law is going to be difficult without them."Knowles agreed, indicating that departments with less funding would be at a loss without the stickers."You're going to put a small-town department in a position where you're taking a valuable tool away from them," Knowles, a former officer himself, said.PennDOT officials have said that the savings accrued from the sticker elimination could be funneled into a grant program for the purchase of readers.However, with more than 1,100 local departments, the possibility of outfitting every vehicle with a reader is unlikely - even if each department was allotted for a single reader grant a year, the expenditure would dwarf the modest sticker savings by tens of millions of dollars per year. And without those grants, many departments simply cannot fit a reader into their budget.Aside from the prohibitive expense, dropping the visual registration may eliminate just cause in pulling over an otherwise suspicious vehicle.Biechy pointed out that outdated or absent registration could, on occasion, be indicative of other infractions - a stolen vehicle, drug trafficking, driving while intoxicated, etc. Without the stickers, and lacking an electronic reader, the police are at a disadvantage."Unless there's another reason to pull the vehicle over, we'll have no idea if the registration is good or not," Biechy said.Members of the state's House of Representatives attempted to repeal the sticker elimination with HB 1154, sponsored by state Rep. Dom Costa, D-24th, during the summer of 2015, but the bill was tabled in April.Knowles, who supported the original repeal, said that it is very likely to be reintroduced in a future session, and intends to co-sponsor the measure.