THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 3, 1994 TAG: 9411030371
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Short : 34 lines
Virginia motorists still will have to get their cars inspected once a year while state officials study whether the requirement should be dropped.
Gov. George Allen's Blue Ribbon Strike Force backed off a recommendation that the annual inspections be dropped as part of its plan to reform state government. The panel had proposed that the inspections be done only when a vehicle is sold. But in final votes on the recommendations, the strike force decided to have the Department of Motor Vehicles and the state police study the idea, chairman Otis Brown said Wednesday.
Brown said panel members wanted more data from other states where inspections have been dropped. Consumer advocates had raised concerns that ending the inspections would jeopardize safety.
The 60-member citizen commission settled on about 250 recommendations in a meeting that ended late Tuesday. Allen will get the report later this month.
``What the recommendations do is begin to change the culture of the way the state operates to one in which the customer becomes paramount and not the system,'' Brown said.
The panel's other recommendations include abolishing 16,000 state jobs, ending regulation of car dealers, limiting museum funding and privatizing the hospitals at the Medical College of Virginia and the University of Virginia. by CNB