Please help! My daughter’s car is registered in Fort Bend County. So I thought it would be easy peasy & she would have her car inspected near UTSA campus. Not so fast! Turns out FB requires emissions testing and Bexar Co. doesn’t. My local tax accessor’s office thought she would just need to ask for the emissions test as part of her state car inspection. This is turning out to be harder than we thought bc no one in Bexar seems to do emissions testing since they don’t require it. So now the clock is ticking (yes, my daughter procrastinated) and we are unsure how to proceed. I spoke to a guy at Firestone in San Antonio and he mentioned an affidavit stating that the car is currently mainly being driven in SA. Or others have said drive to Travis Co./Austin for the inspection. Not ideal, bc I don’t want her driving all over tarnation. We are not even allowing her to drive home. The car is more for roaming near campus. Anyone else have this issue & how did you resolve it? I keep thinking she can have it inspected when she is home for Thanksgiving, but she is flying! We’ve had car repairs & a speeding ticket (yet to be resolved) & now this. I am good as long as there have been no accidents ?.
Change the registration address of the car where it is currently parked and used? This will also require informing the car insurance company.
We had a similar issue when my daughter’s car was with her, 900 miles away ,when emissions testing came due in November. There is a procedure in our state for declaring that the car is not in the state, though, that would have covered her. We ended up not having to do it because it turned out that the emissions test that was done when we bought the car was just (by one day!) inside the one-year window, but surely other jurisdictions have similar procedures. (Then I had her take her car for its annual emissions test when she was home over the summer, and that covered it for the next year.)
Driving from San Antonio to Austin isn’t exactly all over “tarnation.” She could take 130 toll road to Austin-it’s not nearly as crowded and scary as I-35. I take this all the time when I drive between San Antonio and Dallas.
Alternatively, are there some closer counties that do require the emissions test?
We had our kids get AAA because they could have DMV services and I believe emissions testing in CA at their AAA branch near campus.
Maybe call Tx AAA and see if they have a similar situation?
I found this map. It appears that Travis county is the closest county to San Antonio that requires emissions testing.
https://www.dps.texas.gov/rsd/vi/inspection/inspectioncriteria.aspx
She could go to an inspection location on the edge of town-she wouldn’t have to do a deep dive into the center of S.A.
Our state (IL) allows for out of area exemptions. It required some digging at the web site, then some basic documents to be scanned and sent in.
Turns out there is an affadavit required for this type of situation: car registered in emissions county/but being used in non emissions. No one I talked to at several inspection places seemed to know what the heck I was talking about.
My local tax assessor’s office was iffy about it too. Sorry for my error in the original post: assessor not accessor! So after getting non answers from my local office; they even went as far as telling me I needed to speak with DPS (hoping this is not the case, bc it is impossible to speak to them by phone), I spoke to the very helpful folks at Potranco Automotive in San Antonio.
Gary the manager said they deal with this all the time with students and military. Apparently when they go to do the inspection of a car from another county/or I suppose one that is from one that does require an emissions test they get a “red flag” and the affadavit is generated on the bottom of the inspection sheet.
I am not sure if I put that correctly, but I was just so relieved I finally spoke to someone who seemed to understand my dilemma! So I sent my daughter to them and she now has the passed inspection paper w/affadavit noted.
I’ll go to the office tomorrow and see what happens. The inspection took a few minutes and the tax assessors office is practically in my neighborhood, so hope this is all it takes!
And It’s my understanding that there is no need to reregister a student’s car in the University’s county, bc it is fine for them to keep their home address as their permanent address. That goes for driver’s license and car insurance.
My daughter sent a photo copy of the inspection and it reads: affadavit type: not operated in
county.
The Texas Commision on Environmental Quality states: The TCEQ, in conjunction with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles (TxDMV), is authorized to deny a vehicle’s registration renewal if the vehicle had not passed its annual emissions inspection and has not complied with the program requirements. The following items may be presented at the time of renewal to show the vehicle has met emissions inspection requirements:
Exemption Affidavit (formally identified as a Texas Department of Public Safety Form VIE-12): An owner of a vehicle registered in Brazoria, Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, El Paso, Fort Bend, Galveston, Harris, Johnson, Kaufman, Montgomery, Parker, Rockwall, Tarrant, Travis, and Williamson Counties may have a vehicle safety inspection performed in a county where the emissions inspection is not required if one of the following conditions is true:
the vehicle will not be primarily operated (driven, parked, or stored less than 60 days per year) in one of the affected counties listed above (examples: certain company fleet vehicles, hunting vehicles);
the vehicle will no longer be primarily operated for 60 calendar days per inspection cycle in one of the counties listed above (example: someone who moved from an affected county);
the vehicle will not return to an affected county prior to the expiration of the current vehicle registration sticker (example: student, vacationer, extended out-of-town business); or
the vehicle is inoperable and will not be operated in an affected county.
The owner of the vehicle must complete the affidavit process for the vehicle emissions inspection exemption at the inspection station performing the annual vehicle safety inspection and the affidavit notation must be printed on the vehicle inspection report.
The above makes me wonder if we will need to produce form VIE-12. Yikes! I sure hope not.
So I am about to find out tomorrow if this will suffice.
If I don’t report back it means that it all went well ?
Also, can replies to our queries on here be sent to our email? I always have to go back and search for replies. Thanks to all who answered & if this works out, hope it will be of help to others with same issue.
Wow, what a hassle. Hope you get it all worked out!
Since Thanksgiving is next week, it’s probably good for her to just get it renewed then. This is goofy, since the state of Texas handles registrations and inspections anyway. If she doesn’t, the good news is that the FB county doesn’t have any jurisdiction in Bexar county, so she’s perfectly legal if she renews it in San Antonio.
Hey everyone, I know I said if I don’t report back that means all went well, but I thought I would get back anyway!
I have the new sticker WooHoo!!! ?
No questions asked at Tax Assessor. Handed them the notice we’d received for renewal. They looked it up, I paid & we were done. I am actually always very grateful at the ease of how things are handled in our great state of Texas. Especially in my sort of small town. Hee hee. I can say that now that I have my sticker in hand! No really, compared to some places, we’ve got it made. I appreciate how organized things are.
I miss the small town I grew up in where everyone literally knew my name. Times have changed.
So no hassle really. Painless. Just took us a hot minute to figure this out. I think what made it more complicated was that I was getting information piece meal.
Who knows, maybe any inspection place in San Antonio would have handled it properly. It just seemed like everyone I spoke to did not know what I was referring to or understand the situation. Kind of odd because the first place I called was really close to UTSA campus. You’d think they’d get these situations on a regular basis.
No biggie after all. Maybe any inspection place is automatically prompted to put the “not operated in county” note on the inspection.
I was all ready to fill out a VIE-12 DPS form, but since I obtained the new sticker & was not asked for the form. I guess we are good??
I may actually call the automotive place back and ask more about it all. Hey, inquiring minds want to know!!
I am one of those people ?.
Thanks for y’all’s responses & glad I got the sticker. So now my student will be home for the holidays (flying; not driving) & she can have fun getting the sticker on the car when she goes back to school.
This was all new to me. I have older grown kids, but the first stayed home and went to school in Houston. The second went out of state & did not have a car.
This last one convinced me to let her take the car, but I still don’t allow her to drive long distance in it. She’d barely gotten her license before leaving home.
Oops, forgot to say: We will look into having the emissions portion done when she is home for summer as “planit” suggests.