DATE: Thursday, July 10, 1997               TAG: 9707100449

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH                    LENGTH:   59 lines

MUSEUM COLLECTS 350 ORDERS TO GET BEACH PLATE ROLLING MUSEUM GETS $15 PER LICENSE TAG AFTER 1,000 ARE SOLD.

At last it's official: There will be a Virginia Beach license plate. But it will probably be at least Labor Day before you see any on area roads.

After nearly two and a half years of promoting the leaping dolphin tags with the words Virginia Beach on them, the Virginia Marine Science Museum finally has the 350 orders needed to put the license plate experts at the Powhatan Correctional Center to work.

``We went over the top when we opened Tuesday's mail,'' Alice Scanlan, the museum's director of marketing, said Wednesday. ``We're going to continue accepting orders at the museum until Friday, and then we're going to bundle them all up and send them to the DMV.''

Scanlan estimates that it will take eight to ten weeks before the plates are delivered.

Reaching the minimum number of orders required by the Division of Motor Vehicles signals the end of a drive that started in the spring of 1995 when Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf and Del. Robert Tata, R-Virginia Beach, filed the first two applications.

It was Tata who had shepherded the bill authorizing special plates for cities and counties through the legislature. ``I'm delighted that there are that many people in Virginia Beach who have ordered plates,'' he said Wednesday. ``They're great rolling billboards for the city. I'm hopeful that more people will buy them once they start seeing them around.''

The staff of the Marine Science Museum hopes so, too.

Once 1,000 of the tags are sold, the museum will receive $15 for each plate in service each year. Proceeds, which could eventually reach $200,000 annually, will be used to support its marine mammal stranding program.

Although tags bearing logos of colleges, fraternal organizations and professions have been big sellers since they were authorized in the 1980s, city and county plates have been decidedly slow sellers.

Fairfax City, with a population of slightly more than 20,000, is the only jurisdiction for which plates were printed in advance. So far, fewer than 70 of the 1,000 that were made for that city have been sold.

Virginia Beach's special plates will sell for $50 if they're not personalized, $60 if they are. Once the new plates are issued, vehicle owners may return their old plates and receive a refund for the time remaining until expiration.

One person who won't have a special plate, however, is Oberndorf. She reluctantly withdrew her application after discovering that her vehicle didn't qualify. ``You have to own the vehicle to get the plates,'' she explained, ``and we don't own one. It's provided by Roger's company.''

Her husband, Roger Oberndorf, is employed by the Ford Motor Company in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: TO ORDER

Virginia Marine Science will accept through Friday. Orders must be

accompanied with a check for $50 for standard plates or $60 for

personalized plates. Orders will be filled by mail in eight to 10

weeks.

For more information call 437-6002. KEYWORDS: LICENSE PLATES

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu