Wildlands Conservation is working to help create a specialty gopher tortoise license plate in the state of Florida. Specialty license plates have been an essential part of the conservation strategy for other Florida species including the manatee, Florida panther, and sea turtles, and we wish to add the gopher tortoise to this list.
The gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) is a threatened species in the state of Florida, primarily due to loss of upland habitat. A keystone species, gopher tortoises dig burrows that are used by more than 360 other animal species, including some that live nowhere else. In order to bring awareness to the plight of the gopher tortoise, we are hoping to create this specialty license plate and propose that the funds generated by the plate be used for gopher tortoise habitat conservation, habitat management, and research. With your help, we can help protect gopher tortoises and their upland habitat.
Wildlands is working with talented conservation illustrator Laurelin Sitterly to create a gopher tortoise license plate design. The Gopher Tortoise Council has also provided a letter of support for this plate. For more updates, follow Wildlands Conservation on Facebook.  

PHOENIX – The specialty license plate “In God We Trust” has come under fire because the group behind the plate is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBTQ views.
Secular Coalition for Arizona, a nonprofit that promotes the separation of church and state in government, asks on its website “Why is Arizona money funding a hate group?”
Alliance Defending Freedom, a Scottsdale-based Christian nonprofit whose mission is to “defend religious liberty,” has collected $827,000 from sales of the license plates since 2014, according to a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Transportation. The agency provides and distributes specialty plates that have been approved by legislators.
“That’s their right to have their hateful views and to push their hateful policies, but we shouldn’t be using the government to help them raise the money to do it,” said state Sen. Juan Mendez, D-Tempe, who is proposing two bills to offer more transparency on specialty plates.
This is the first time the group has received any pushback on the license plate, said Kristen Waggoner, senior vice president of the U.S. legal division for the alliance.
“Secular Coalition of Arizona is targeting Alliance Defending Freedom and the license plate because it disagrees with the view that the license plate expresses,” she said.
For each license plate sold or renewed annually, the group collects $17. In fiscal year 2018, 11,169 license plates with the motto were sold or renewed.
The state offers more than 60 specialty license plates, according to ADOT. To create a new plate, a state lawmaker must introduce a bill and have it approved by both houses of the Legislature. Motorists can request specialty and custom plates through ServiceArizona.
ADOT’s role is to provide the plates to customers “and distribute the funds generated from the plate sales as required in the law,” an agency spokesman said in an email.
Mendez has introduced two bills, SB 1462 and 1463, that would eliminate the “In God We Trust” plate and require ADOT to keep a publicly-accessible database that includes the names and missions of the organizations that receive money from the plates.
Source: Cronkite Daily News.

The Endless Summer specialty license plate depicting a surfer image and the slogan 'Endless Summer', under license from California based Bruce Brown Films, LLC, moved up to second place in the top selling specialty plate charts by revenue, jumping over Florida State University and Helping Sea Turtles Survive.
The Protect Wild Dolphins specialty plate, benefiting FAU/Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, dropped two places to sixth, from eighth.

The number of Florida specialty license plates sold in 2018 dropped slightly from 1,454,408 to 1,446,632. The sales are still quite lower than the 1,630,330 sold in 2008, prior to the huge increase in fees and taxes that was passed by the Florida State Legislature at the height of the economic depression that became effective in August, 2009.