Do any of you have to deal with government paperwork for transferring bicycle ownership when repairing or reselling donated bikes?
Does anyone else but Hawaii have such a system?
If I don't hear from anyone I'll assume it is a system unique to Hawaii.
The system is:
Mandatory $15 onetime registration fee/tax, if your bike doesn't have a yellow registration sticker on it, police can impound it and give you a $50 ticket. You can get your bike back by paying the $15 tax later. It is really only enforced on homeless people. There are many unregistered bikes around--newcomers and tourists and even long time residents are not complying with the system. To transfer ownership it is $5 and more paperwork. Basically they've been treating bikes like mopeds for many years now.
I'm hoping we can do away with that system, and shift to a free registration system like
bikeindex.org. We'll see. However, a significant local bike organization, HBL.org, gets funds from the tax for education programs.