When Capt. Steve Moore began his law enforcement career in the 1980s, state license plates were easily identifiable. Moore, who is interim chief for Mauldin's police department, said "They all stayed the same for a while. Then everybody started getting fancy, and the fancier they got, the more difficult they became to figure out."

For some, that task may become even harder. South Carolina already has 95 different license plates available. State legislators gave the nod this year for 15 more.

They would allow motorists to express their support of the Marine Corps League, the Fraternal Order of Police, the U. S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy, Emergency Medical Service, Boy Scouts of America, Native Americans, the South Carolina Peach Council, Korean War Veterans, Cancer Research Centers of the Carolinas, Support Our Troops and the South Carolina Aquarium.

Danny Varat, research director for the state Transportation Committee, said the General Assembly's approval of the plates doesn't automatically whisk them into production. The bill allowing for the plates still has to be signed into law by Gov. Mark Sanford.

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Sanford has signed legislation thus far approving only three new specialty plates. They are the Hunting Island State Park, Breast Cancer Awareness, and the Parrot Head special license plate.

Joel Sawyer, a spokesman for the governor, said the bill legislating the other plates was one of many sent to Sanford's office on the last day of the legislative session.

That bill has not yet been reviewed to determine whether the governor will sign, veto or allow the bill to become law without his signature, Sawyer said.

If the new plates are allowed to become law, "there's still a process by which the DMV takes an application from a group, approves the design, and gets a deposit," Varat said. To get a new plate printed, organizations must pay a fee of $4,000 or receive 400 or more prepaid applications for the plate. The cost of a standard South Carolina tag is $24. Specialty tags can cost more and allow colleges, nonprofit organizations, and other groups to raise funds and promote awareness. For example, the cost of World War II plates, available only to veterans and their spouses, is $20 every two years in addition to the regular registration fee. A portion of the fees from the sale of the plates go to the state Department of Education to support and promote ROTC programs in South Carolina public schools, according to the DMV Web site.

Most college and university plates cost $70 plus the registration. Forty dollars from the sale of each plate is sent back to the schools for scholarships, according to the Web page.

According to information from Jessica Barfield, a spokeswoman for the Department of Motor Vehicles, said the University of South Carolina license plate ranked number one in sales from February 2005 to January 2006 with a revenue total of $403, 415. There are currently 7,042 registered vehicles with the USC license plate. Clemson University ranked second in sales during that same period with a sales total of $339,896. Currently, there are 6,713 registered vehicles with the Clemson plate.

Specialty tags are also popular in Georgia, which had 7,945,267 registered vehicles as of June 21. The majority of those vehicles have Wildlife tags, while 199,194 display the Bobwhite Quail Restoration plates, and sales for the University of Georgia tags were at 38,550 as of April 2006, according to Charles Willey, public information director for the Georgia Department of Revenue.

Unlike in South Carolina, only a few special interests groups benefit from sales of their plates. In Arizona and some other states, legislators expressed concern that too many specialty tags may confuse law enforcement.

Spokespeople at the Greenville Police Department, Greenville County Sheriffs Office, the Spartanburg Public Safety Department, and the state Department of Public Safety said they have no reports of officers having difficulty with specialty tags.

Specialty tags have a different number sequence than standard South Carolina tags, Moore said. But it doesn't take officers long to pick on the different number sequences. And officers call in the tags to verify where they're from.

Still he said, "It seems to me that the more tags you get floating around out there, the more likely you are not to discern, at least in a split second, where it belongs. If you've got enough time to figure it out, it's really not a big deal."