Stop HB 1375 / SB 1374 – Act Now!

Dear Legionnaires:

I was extremely dismayed to learn that the HB 1375 / SB 1374 would demolish our highly successful specialty plate program, which includes our Florida Legion specialty plate.

If this legislation passes, the Florida Legion specialty plate, and other Florida specialty plates, will no longer be available. More to the point, the funds raised from the sale of Florida specialty plates will no longer be available. 

For the Florida Legion, this would devastate our programs that depend on this critical funding. Our veterans, families, and communities would suffer without the assistance of these funds.

Florida specialty plates in general provide a safety net for tens of thousands of our children, elderly, disabled, veterans, the list is nearly endless, this is a safety net that the Legislature does not have to fund.  Over $600 million has been raised by voluntary donations through the specialty plate program since its inception.

Each Florida specialty plate funds a 501c3 non-profit organization within the State of Florida.  Any attempt to move funds out of the state is a turnabout of 40 years of Legislative intent.

We strongly urge you to contact your legislators immediately and tell them to vote NO on these two bills. 

Please vote NO on the two bills.

This legislation will hurt tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of your constituents.

The Department of Highway Safety license plate brochure shows the STANDARD LICENSE PLATE is the one with the oranges in the middle. So you will get a little unnoticeable footnote at the bottom under the proposed legislation.

To do this, they misrepresented to these legislators that your plate does little good and is inconvenient and costly for them to administer. This is not true because you paid a great deal of money to create your plate and the current statute allows them to withhold all of their operating costs for handling your plate.

Here are the emails for the legislators in the committees that will hear this legislation starting tomorrow morning at 8.00am –    

Thank you,
Mike McDaniel
Department Adjutant
Retired U.S. Marine Corps