A motorist who lost his car plate temporarily tacked on an improvised one pending its replacement.

A California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer, however, stopped the vehicle upon noticing it had a hand-drawn tag to resemble an official state plate, UPI reports.

The CHP Merced officer took a photo of the car’s rear plate with the hand-drawn letters, numbers, and logo, plus a fake registration sticker on it. He posted the photos on Instagram with this caption: “While we appreciate the effort to stay compliant after losing the original plate, California law requires vehicles to display state issued plates only.

“If your plates are lost or stolen, you can easily get replacements through the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) instead of breaking out the art supplies.”

Meanwhile, in New York City, the city Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been tapping citizens to record on their phones idling trucks and buses that spew their polluting exhaust in exchange for a 25-percent share of the fine for the traffic offense.

Citizen enforcers have been zealous about reporting violators to the DEP motivated by the share of the $350 to $2,000 fine for idling, 95 percent of which are substantiated for which the offenders pay the penalty, New York Post (NYP) reports.

However, Queens Councilman James Gennaro, who chairs the environmental committee, plans to limit the payouts to the citizen enforcers, claiming that they are raking in close to $1 million each for the whistleblowing under the Big Apple’s Citizen Idling Complaint Program launched in 2019, according to NYP.

“The program has become an occupation; the program was not intended to be an occupation,” Gennaro told NYP.

Citing its records, the DEP revealed the payouts to the top five enviro-enforcers. Leading the list was Ernest Welde of the East Village who collected $895,737, followed by Wanfang Wu of the Lower East Side who received $748,825, Ephraim Rosenbaum also of the Lower East Side who raked in $725,025, Michael Streeter of Brooklyn Heights who was paid $709,975, and Patrick Schnell of Boerum Hill who got $582,800.