PBOT said nearly half of Portland vehicles had expired registrations. The real number is much lower

At a February city council budget work session, Portland Bureau of Transportation Director Millicent Williams provided a stunning statistic supplied by the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles: 46% of all vehicles in Portland had expired registration, more than 460,000 total.

That number — along with many others detailing a steep decline in traffic enforcement and compliance across the city — was presented during the bureau’s pitch for an increase in staff and resources, with hopes of addressing its $32 million budget shortfall. PBOT receives a small portion of fees from each registration collected by the state.

With more officers on the ground, the bureau could enforce greater compliance with local traffic rules, generating an estimated $1 million in additional revenue per year, Williams said.

“Not only has PBOT been looking for new resources to support the bureau, but we’re also looking to efficiently collect the resources we’re already owed,” she said at the time.

But officials with the DMV say that figure — nearly half of all Portland vehicles are noncompliant — is a misinterpretation of the data. The actual percentage of vehicles with lapsed registration is much lower.

In truth, DMV officials estimate about 11% of all vehicles in Multnomah County have expired plates, or around 65,000 in total. That number includes all expired registrations in the county between six months and five years ago, which officials say is a more accurate representation of the problem.

That’s because the numbers presented by PBOT, by comparison, were too broad. They include 460,000 vehicles that would have been omitted by a more narrow and accurate search of the database, the DMV said.

There are lots of reasons why a vehicle might still be in the DMV’s database, even though it hasn’t been driven in years. DMV Administrator Amy Joyce said it could be abandoned, damaged or ineligible for registration. Some vehicles could even be outside of the county.

“If somebody moves out of state and they don’t retitle their vehicle in the new state, that’s going to continue to show up in our data,” Joyce said.

‘The number is less important than the problem’

A PBOT spokesperson said staff realized the data error at least two months ago, but made no plans of issuing a public correction of any kind, despite the figure being widely publicized.

Instead, the bureau stopped using numbers when discussing vehicle registration, opting to use phrases such as “alarming increase” or “significant spike” in official releases. PBOT spokesperson Hannah Schafer said expired registrations are still an issue, no matter the exact size.

“From our perspective, the number is less important than the problem,” Schafer said.

The bureau ultimately hired nearly two dozen new enforcement officers, as part of a planned crackdown on registrations, missing license plates and unpaid parking fees across the city. The new hires cost $3.7 million.

But whether there even has been a spike in unpaid registrations is unclear. Joyce said it’s difficult to know what the number of expired registrations was in previous years — it’s a point-in-time count and is not tracked annually.

Related: Some Oregon DMV fees will go up in 2024

Meanwhile, much of the evidence provided by PBOT has been anecdotal. Schafer said the bureau received many emails from constituents, and that officers had observed an increase during their work.

Jonathan Maus, founder of local news outlet BikePortland, has regularly followed PBOT’s communications and said the initial number did not seem shocking, because many citizens had raised concerns.

“It comports with people’s anecdotal narrative,” Maus said, adding that community concern about unpaid registrations is not uncommon. “That (statistic) was not that shocking to hear.”

But Maus also said the incorrect information was concerning, because it was provided during a pitch for PBOT receiving more funds.

Fewer vehicle registrations across Oregon

Schafer also pointed to the number of citations as an indicator of a widespread problem. PBOT officers wrote nearly 26,000 citations for failure to display registration from May 2023 to May 2024. .

Joyce said the DMV is seeing fewer registrations across the state, especially in Multnomah County, which can create budgetary concerns.

“Across the state in almost every county, we’ve seen a dip in how many vehicles are registered,” she said. “Anytime you’re losing money that’s owed, that’s a problem.”

But she reiterated that the drop is not indicative of how many drivers actually travel around the state with expired tags, and that it’s not something the DMV can easily calculate.

“It is based on human behaviors and things we can’t know,” Joyce said.