LTO to miss October deadline for vehicle plate release in Central Luzon

READY FOR DELIVERY In this photo taken in October 2022, an employee of the Land Transportation Office packs new vehicle plates in the agency’s main office in Quezon City so these can be prepared for distribution. —NIÑO JESUS ORBETA

CEBU CITY—Central Visayas has the biggest number of unclaimed vehicle plates among the country’s regions at 600,000, but a Land Transportation Office (LTO) official said the agency would miss the October deadline set by its central office to distribute these.

“That is kind of impossible. My commitment was that by the end of the two-month period, there should be a dramatic drop in the number of plates in our warehouse,” said Glen Galario, LTO regional director.

LTO chief Vigor Mendoza II, on Aug. 4, asked the LTO Central Visayas office to clear its backlog and distribute the plates within two months. In July, the Commission on Audit noted that the LTO had yet to distribute 1.7 million vehicle plates to its owners.

Galario said among the problems that his office had encountered in the distribution was that many vehicle owners did not know that their plates were already available for claiming.The LTO in the region, he said, has only one scanner or bar code reader, and a set of computers, which can process only 50 plates a day. Before a plate is released, its bar code needs to be scanned so information stored on the plate would be uploaded to the LTO’s central data system.

Equipment requestGalario said his office had already requested from central office for five more scanners and computer sets, hoping that these would arrive soon and speed up the claiming process.

He asked all LTO district and extension offices in Central Visayas to collect the required documents from vehicle owners so their personnel could notify them once the plates are available.

LTO personnel have also started flagging down vehicles and motorcycles using temporary plates in order to cross-check their documents with their records of available plates.

Aden Belza, head of operations division of the LTO regional office, said they had to resort to this measure so they could easily verify if the plates were ready for release.

Belza added that the LTO was also planning to partner with fleet operators, local governments, motoring clubs and other organizations that could assist the agency in the distribution of the vehicle plates.

RELATED STORIES

LTO eyes digitizing driver’s license renewal, student permit issuance

LTO: Expired driver’s license now valid until April 2024

—DALE G. ISRAEL