By Vernon Robison
Moapa Valley Progress
Moapa Valley residents have long been accustomed to seeing tractors and farm equipment travelling on local roads and highways. When these vehicles are simply being moved from one field to another to do agricultural work, their operation has, in the past, gone largely without regulation in state law. But one bill, currently before the Nevada State Legislature, would change that.
Under existing law, any person temporarily driving a “road machine, farm tractor or implement of husbandry on a highway” is exempt from obtaining a driver’s license to do so. Assembly Bill #247, proposed by Assemblyman Pete Goioechea of Eureka, Nevada, would allow this exemption only under certain conditions.
A person seeking the exemption would have to obtain a special decal from the Department of Motor Vehicles. A fee of $20 would be charged for the decal.
At the time of application for the decal, the person would have to show the DMV that he/she is the holder of a liability insurance policy providing at least $300,000 in coverage for bodily injury and property damage resulting from any accident caused by the person while driving the equipment.
It would be required that the decal be displayed somewhere on the road machine, farm tractor or implement of husbandry.
The decal would be linked to the person and not to the equipment. Thus each person that drives that piece of equipment would need a separate decal affixed to the equipment.
Also the bill would require that an emblem for slow moving vehicles be displayed on the equipment and that vehicular hazard-warning lamps be displayed while driving on the highway.
In the Executive Agency Fiscal Note for the bill it was estimated that the cost for the State to implement the bill would be $168,006. This would include regulation and training costs and computer systems programming to enable tracking of all decals issued.
This estimate did not include what it would cost for local police departments to update their computer systems to access the state’s decal registration database and other costs of enforcement.
The report stated that the Department of Motor Vehicles was unable to identify the number of persons wishing to obtain the decals and therefore was unable to determine any potential increase in revenue.
Local Metro Sergeant Bret Empey expressed concern that the bill, if passed, would raise a lot of questions about areas of the law that are already unclear.
“For example, if a person uses a four-wheeler OHV to go out to the field and turn the irrigation water, that essentially becomes an implement of husbandry,” Empey said. “They get this decal to put onto their four-wheeler and suddenly an area of enforcement that was already pretty unclear gets a lot more complicated.”
Empey feared that a law resulting from this bill would be unenforceable. He pointed out that the bill provides no information about exactly where on the equipment the decal should be attached. And each operator of the equipment would have to obtain a different decal. To enforce the law, officers would have to stop each and every agricultural vehicle being operated on the highway in order to determine if the driver was in compliance.
“It would be a real enforcement headache,” Empey said.
Contact Info for State Legislators:
Senator Joe Hardy, jhardy@sen.state.nv.us;
Assemblyman Cresent Hardy, chardy@asm.state.nv.us.
