On The Money: Disabled Placards For Dead People

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) -- Dead people don't drive – yet thousands of deceased Californians are receiving handicap parking placards in the mail, courtesy of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

David Kasama of Rocklin received a disabled parking placard in the mail – even though his mother Mary Kasama died nine years ago. David Kasama doesn't use the placard – but it would be easy to do so – because DMV keeps sending it to him – along with thousands of others people around the state. In fact, David Kasama has received three placards in the last nine years.

"Sometimes the DMV has figured out that she's deceased," Kasama told CBS 13. "And sometimes it doesn't. I got this placard probably about a year ago and my mom has passed away for 9 years," he added.

It is expensive to produce and send out disabled placards.

"It costs us an average of $11 million every other year to mail these out," said Jaime Garza, a spokesman for DMV.

Garza added, "That's a lot of money and we're doing the best we can to make sure the placards go out to the correct people."

So how many dead people are receiving the disabled placards?

"We don't know how many placards are being issued to deceased people," Garza told CBS 13.

The problem is DMV's database – the death records are at least a year old – so oftentimes placards are sent out to people who died months ago.

In the most recent cross-check of the data, DMV discovered 56,000 placards that were slated to be mailed to dead people – before DMV pulled them from circulation.

Disabled placards can be worth their weight in gold – saving drivers hundreds of dollars each year in parking fees. But a recent DMV sting in Los Angeles found one-third of all the placards issued were being used illegally.

That troubles people like David Kasama – who says DMV has got to do better preserving taxpayer money – and his mother's memory.

"They're not sending me a renewal for her driver's license," Kasama noted.

"Why can't they work with those people who are issuing the driver's license - for these placards?" he added.

It's a crime to use a disabled placard that doesn't belong to you – fines can be as much as $1,000 for doing so. The abuse is costing cities millions of dollars in lost parking revenue.

So what is DMV doing about updating its database?

"Right now we're looking at other options," Jaime Garza said. "We want to speed up the lag times. We are looking at the feasibility of possibly linking in to private databases or the federal databases."

But DMV wants to make sure the upgrade would cost-effective.

"Under the circumstances of where we are financially in the state, I don't think the taxpayers are going to want us to just spend money arbitrarily to take care of a problem. We want to be fiscally responsible, so we're trying to look at every option to speed up that lag time. But until then, this is the system we have in place. And we're doing our best. " Garza told CBS 13.