By the end of the month, vehicle registration stickers will be a thing of the past.

And while the move is intended to save money, some law enforcement officials have expressed concerns about possible impacts to enforcement.

Beginning Dec. 31, motorists will no longer be required to place the color-coded, 1-inch stickers on their license plates.

The elimination of registration stickers, issued by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, was included in Act 89, a transportation bill passed by legislators in 2013.

An estimated $3.1 million in material sticker and mailing costs are expected to be saved annually as a result of the change, PennDOT spokeswoman Alexis Campbell said.

The stickers’ elimination should not be confused with the elimination of vehicle registration, Campbell said. Registration is required by law.

“We’ve been communicating with our customers about this change for a long a time,” she said. “We’ve been very clear that this only deals with the registration sticker not the registration itself.”

However, steps have been taken to make registration more convenient. Motorists will now be able to register vehicles online, Campbell said.

“You’ll still need to print it out,” she said, explaining motorists will still need to present a signed registration if pulled over by police.

A mail-in option will still be available for those without internet access, Campbell said.

Campbell also highlighted a new feature, which will allow motorists to register vehicles for two years instead of the standard one.

“You’ll just pay double the fee,” she said. “It’s just an added convenience.”

Visible stickers have been a tool for police to enforce registration compliance, but their absence is not anticipated to have a drastic impact, Campbell said.

She pointed to a Penn State study, which says the elimination will have “relatively no change to registration compliance.”

The study took into account states that already did away with the stickers, such as New Jersey and Connecticut.

“Penn State used them as examples and both of those states have reported relatively no change,” she said.

Police officers will continue to have access to tools that allow them to match license plate numbers to registration information, Campbell said.

“Law enforcement today has real time access to PennDOT’s database,” she said.

Still, some officers have spoken out against the stickers’ elimination in the past, noting enforcement will become more difficult.

In February, Duncansville Police Chief Jim Ott called the change “a terrible idea,” according to a previous Mirror report.

“There’s no way, unless you run each and every plate, to tell if a vehicle is registered,” Ott said at that time.

It is unclear if there will be any changes to enforcement practices locally, as messages left Wednesday afternoon for officers at multiple Blair County police departments were not returned.

The change is something of a nonevent for state police, said Cpl. Adam Reed, a state police spokesman.

“It’s going to be business as usual for us,” he said.

State police officers will continue to use the PennDOT database, running plates during traffic stops, Reed said.

“Normally we would run that registration before a stop,” he said. “Not much is going to change.”

The last registration sticker is to be issued Dec. 30. After that date, they will no longer have to be displayed, but motorists who already applied the stickers will not be required to remove them, Campbell said.

“We actually don’t recommend that you attempt to do that because you can damage your plate,” she said.

New license plates will no longer include an indented spot where registration stickers are now applied, Campbell said. The only other change to the plates will be an outline of the state near the upper-left corner, she said.

Mirror Staff Writer Sean Sauro is at 946-7535.