Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: You're live.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: This is Senate Transportation Committee. We are, resuming our testimony on February 6. We have the UVM legislative report, and we have a couple of people from UVM. And if you could introduce yourselves and give a little background, and then we'll go into your report about inspections and emission testing. You're muted.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Oh, perfect. Hi. Thank you so much for having us here today. My name for the record is Adeline Collin.

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: And my name is Rhiannon Hubbard, and both of us, Adeline and I, student researchers with the Vermont Legislative Research Service last semester.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: The report we're presenting today was completed in response from a request from representative Larry Labour. And in his original question, he asked us how many states have discontinued annual motor vehicle inspections, and given safety concerns, how many states conduct emissions only testing, and how frequently? And to answer that, we reviewed all 50 state safety and emissions inspections laws using state statues, administrative rules, and information from state agency websites. For each state, we recorded whether inspections were annual or biennial, and whether they were statewide or county specific, and whether the state required safety inspections, emissions testings, both or neither. We also noted variations such as new vehicle exemption periods and model year cutoffs when that information was available. Our research focused strictly on what each state requires, meaning like the structure and frequency of their inspection programs, rather than the policy rationales behind those laws or their effectiveness. And I wanted to clarify for the committee that we completed this report on November 19, so before the beginning of the twenty twenty six legislative session.

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: And I'll be going into kind of the content of the report now. Starting with safety inspections, specifically we found that 17 states required routine passenger vehicle safety inspections. Nine of those states were annual requirements and eight of those states were biennial, so every two years. Among those 17 states, the New England states are Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, and at the time New Hampshire, and then Rhode Island was the only biennial, state with biennial requirements. And then in terms of emissions inspections, we found that 27 states have some sort of vehicle emissions testing requirements. 10 of those states are annual, 15 of those states are biennial. Colorado was kind of an interesting and unique case. They had some legislation that took into account what year the vehicle was made and what county it was registered under that made it either biennial or annual. And then New Hampshire of course makes 27 with their requirements changing at the beginning of this year. Another detail that we found relevant to emissions inspections was that a lot of states had emissions testing requirements only in certain counties that were in or surrounding metropolitan areas and hubs. So whether that's a state like New York or Colorado or Texas, those emissions inspection requirements varied based on the location. And then under the umbrella of no recurring vehicle inspection laws, five states only had inspection laws that were written out as law enforcement being permitted to conduct roadside vehicle inspections if they suspected a vehicle on the road of malfunctioning or something of that sort. And then 10 states had no emissions or safety inspection requirement laws at all. With five of those states, we found discontinuing their laws in the past twenty six years since 2000.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Yes. So in overall patterns we found was New England was the region in The US with the most stringent vehicle inspection laws, particularly Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts all have annual vehicle safety inspections and Rhode Island with biennial. And of the states that do not have any safety or emissions requirements, they're primarily located in the Southern And Upper Midwest in the plain regions of The US, which are amongst the least populated in The US. So that really encapsulates the entirety of our report. And we, again, wanted to thank you so much for this opportunity, and we are open to questions. Thank you. Thank you.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Well, thank you both so much. I'm a UVM alumni, so I'm really grateful that you have the Legislative Research Service and I've used it myself. And I'm happy to hear that it was I had not known what representative had actually requested this report. So I appreciate that it came from Representative Larry Labor making the interest in this topic bipartisan. So I have one question which is your report is very detailed and short, so I appreciate the succinctness of it. But I'm wondering if you had any information about when states in, so you have a list on page four of states that require biannual admissions testing. And I'm wondering if you have any insight into if they started out as annual and moved to biannual or if they had always had their programs be biannual. And if you don't know the answer now, that's fine. We can also You've got a ton of sources, so it's definitely somewhere in your sources. Yeah,

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: that's a good question and one I'm not sure the answer to, but we could definitely look into that.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: We'd be happy to send a follow-up, yeah.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: And did you find any trends of, have any states added safety inspection requirements, or is the trend that they're taking them or moving them back, they're moving away from them? Have any states been newly added to the list essentially?

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Let me I have a few notes about that. A lot of the emissions testing legislation came from the Clean Air Act in 1990. So, that came down from the federal level, that's when a lot of these states started making them. Like we said, five states from 2,000 have redacted them. I'm not sure if that's but a trend of any we didn't find that they were adding any recently. But I don't know if

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Yeah, I would have to agree with what you said. Great.

[Sen. Rebecca "Becca" White (Vice Chair)]: Yeah. Thank you. That's very helpful.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Of course.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: So just hi, thank you so much. It's great to see you and appreciate your work. Did you look at all at crash data or anything that might correlate with inspections? You know, some folks think that inspections would lead to safer vehicles, so there might be different sorts of crash. Data.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Yeah, for sure. That is like the common concern with the safety inspections. Again, we did not look into too deeply the policy rationales behind why safety inspections were annual or biannual or not at all. But

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: I mean Yeah, we didn't compile any data on

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: We more so looked at state agency websites and government entities like the DMV or the state equivalent to a DMV of what the most recent update is on their legislative requirements for safety and emissions testing.

[Sen. Wendy Harrison (Clerk)]: Okay, if you ever come around and notice a crash data, that would be helpful.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: We'd be more than happy to look into that, and if we come up with anything of significance, then share that with the committee assistant to give to the chair.

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Perfect, thank you.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Yes, you're welcome.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: This is really helpful, and I don't see any other hands up around the room, but this is very well done, and thank you very much for coming and presenting this to us.

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Yes. Thank you so much for having us.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: We're we're in the middle of looking at all of this, and this is really good information for us.

[Adeline Collin (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Perfect. Yes. I hope it helps two eleven get on its way. Yes.

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Will.

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: Thank you very much.

[Rhiannon Hubbard (UVM Legislative Research Service)]: Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you. Bye bye. And

[Sen. Richard Westman (Chair)]: I think we are done for the day.