RADFORD, VA - Vehicle decals should soon be a thing of the past in the City of Radford.

No more scraping of that old decal to make way for the new one each year. No more standing in that long line at the city treasurer’s office if you forget to purchase your decal and find yourself trying to obtain it on the last day before the deadline. And no more worrying about a ticket from police if your vehicle is seen without the city-issued decal, according to www.ourvalley.org.

Radford City Council voted unanimously Monday to abolish vehicle decals in the city. However, the change does not mean vehicle owners will get a pass on shelling out the money they have been paying for decals. Rather, that money will now be paid in the form of a motor vehicle license fee that will likely appear on personal property tax tickets each year. And the fee could go up by a few dollars from the $21 most vehicle owners have been paying per vehicle.

In a memo to council members, Radford City Treasurer Janet Jones said Montgomery County has recently decided to abolish their decal system and has instituted a motor vehicle license fee instead, just as Radford plans to do. Montgomery County is also now using the same municipal computer software system that the city is in the process of converting to. According to Jones, that system, Munis, only allows for one set fee across the board; the city has been charging a fee by gross weight up to this point, meaning large vehicles are charged a higher fee.

“We would need to have a set fee for all vehicles,” Jones writes in the Aug. 22 memo. “This couldn’t be by gross weight as it is now.”

In order for the city to not lose revenue through the change, Radford City Manager Tony Cox said the fee would have to be made slightly higher to accommodate the lost revenue from larger vehicles. No rate was decided Monday.

“There will be an adjustment in the rate,” he said. “It won’t be significant. There will be winners and losers.”

Cox also praised the research Jones put in to the possibility of the change.

Jones also announced Monday that the treasurer’s office will be holding a land sale this fall to auction off approximately 20 parcels of land for which real estate taxes have not been paid for a significant amount of time.