Vanity Plates

As was to be expected, former Prime Minister William Marlin countered Minister Emil Lee’s story with his side of the story: He never gave Minister Lee permission to use MR plate on his private vehicle. The saying goes, there is always three sides to a story, your side, his side and the truth.

Whichever side prevails, we believe Minister Lee will continue to sweat bullets for a while as he continues to remain in the hot seat of the Ministry of VSA and the opposition continues to keep him in their firing sights.

There is however another side of this story we are curious about and that concerns the validity and the legality of the personalized SXM, MR and PAR plates.

We often assume – without just cause – that something that is a common practice here on St. Maarten has a legal basis for it. Clearly that is not always the case. We would assume that the Governor’s cabinet did their homework in regards to the SXM-1 license plates. It might be a stretch, but we also assume that that is the case where the Council of Minister’s MR-plates are concerned as well.

However, we are betting a Yearly Subscription to our StMaartenNews.com newsletter that Parliament’s PAR-1 vanity plates have no place in the traffic ordinance of Sint Maarten. Why do we think that? We simply look at Parliament’s track record in passing laws and amendments over the past 7 years.

For that assessment we will use Hilbert Haar’s rock solid formula I+A=R, which signifies Intention plus Action equals Result. Parliament always have the Intention to do something but most often lacks the Action to do what needs to be done and therefore we all know the Result all too well.

So we would love to see in black and white the legal basis for the use of the personalized SXM, MR and PAR plates. Maybe a LBHAM Nummerbordengebruik or amended Wegenverkeersverordening Sint Maarten?

To our legal minds among our readers, if you have any idea, please do let us know. We will be glad to inform the rest of our readership what the truth is.