Our Opinion: Making laws and the law of unintended consequences

Friday, February 22, 2013

Lawmaking has been known to collide with the law of unintended consequences.

A law intended to aid removal of a rural eyesore — specifically, junk cars — is being criticized for encouraging car thieves to steal them for scrap.

Legislation that became effective in August 2012 legalized the sale of nonfunctioning vehicles 10 years or older without a title. The law, sponsored by then-state Sen. Kevin Engler reduced the previous 20-year limit.

Engler, now a Republican state representative from Farmington, said the change was intended to help rural landowners get rid of junk vehicles abandoned on their property.

But Sgt. Tom Naughton, head of the St. Louis County police auto theft unit, blames the law for an increase in the theft of older autos to be sold as scrap.

“There’s big money in this,” he said. “You can’t make it harder to recycle other things and then make it easier to scrap a car.”

St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch added: “This law clearly had unintended consequences and we have to look at changing it back or finding some other solution to the matter.”

Engler believes the solution is less blame and more enforcement. “I guess they’ve got to blame it on something,” he said. “They need to tighten up enforcement of the law and they’ll be fine.”

Unintended consequences are not without precedent in the lawmaking process.

Jefferson City now is coping with the consequences of election law changes.

A change prohibited our city from conducting primary elections in February, unless February was specified in the City Charter. It was not.

As a consequence, the city has moved a primary election (a primary is needed in the First Ward, where three candidates have filed) to March. That move, however, created added consequences — deadlines and ballot printing — for the Cole County clerk.

The legislative process — which includes 163 representatives, 34 senators and hundreds of lobbyists representing a wide range of interests — is designed so proposals will be scrutinized and refined to foresee potential problems.

The process works well most of the time, but not always.

More like this story

JCLifer 2 months, 3 weeks ago

The process works well most of the time, but not always.

Uh, have you looked around lately? The process is broke. It hardly works at all. Our country is falling apart, and the Constitutution is being shredded by our enemies. The economy is horrific. Were are the jobs that we spent all our tax dollars and our childrens' future to stimulate? We have over $16,000,000,000,000.00 in debt.

The process hase been destroyed, just like our country.

connor 2 months, 3 weeks ago

The process no longer works because it is not being "processed" at the level it needs to be. The Federal government , including all it's departments and in turn the States are attempting to legislate with a broad brush and what works in one area does not work in another. The car title legislation you mention is a good example of this variance in area needs.

The trickle down taxation giving the Federal government unlimited control of the funds and thereby able to coerce the State and smaller governments into line is the spring from which this problem flows but by no means the end of it. Add in a bit of mob rule democracy and Social engineering religious Multi-Cult dogma and we see "one size fit's all" taken to an extreme measure of dysfunction all for some pipe dream of equal outcome.

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