County treasurers press committee to reallocate registration and title fees as KDOT warns of $16 million highway-fund gap

County treasurers from across Kansas urged the Senate Transportation Committee to approve Senate Bill 119, a proposal to reallocate existing motor-vehicle fees to provide more funding for county tag-and-title offices. Treasurers told senators that decades-old statutory allocations no longer cover the cost of running modern motor-vehicle operations and that counties are increasingly using property-tax dollars to fill the gap.

Brandy Bailey, Sedgwick County treasurer, said Sedgwick relied on county property taxes to subsidize tag operations by about $200,000 three years ago, $374,000 in 2023, $655,000 last year and a projected $960,000 in 2025. Bailey said her office handles roughly 415,000 registration renewals and 9,000 title transactions annually and employs 79 people across two tag offices; she told the committee a reallocation failure would force cuts of about 25 staffers and could close an entire office. “Please please, pass this out favorably so that…