AUSTIN- The Texas Transportation Commission agreed Thursday with the voters by unanimously approving the Lone Star Texas design as the state’s new general-issue license plate.

The plate, which took the top spot among five design selections in an online vote earlier this month, features the big Texas sky with wide brushes of blue and red, the familiar Lone Star, and the mountains of West Texas. The plate design received 455,878 of the more than 1.1 million votes cast.

“As one of the online voters told us, this license plate design shows the majesty of our state, and we agree,” said Hope Andrade, interim Transportation Commission chairman. “We feel honored to be able to give Texans the plate of their choice.”

By law, the Transportation Commission must approve the state’s general-issue license plate, but commissioners wanted to hear from Texans and authorized the first online design selection in the state’s history.

“It was wonderful the way Texans embraced this opportunity,” Andrade said. “People were talking about the e-Vote at their places of work, in classrooms and with their families.”

Almost 10,000 Texans sent e-mails explaining why they voted for a particular design, and many of them thanked the Texas Department of Transportation for allowing them to be a part of the license plate selection.

“The commissioners appreciated all of your e-mails, the thoughtful and often heartfelt expressions of why you selected one design over another,” Andrade said. “While many of you expressed your appreciation to us, we are the ones who want to thank all of you for participating in the design selection.”

Manufacturing of the new general-issue license plate will begin in early 2009. The new plate will feature seven-character, alpha-numeric plate patterns. The new plate pattern is necessary because TxDOT will run out of the current six-digit license plate number combinations by the end of this year.

"Texas is a growing state," said TxDOT Vehicle Title and Registration Division Director Rebecca Davio.. "We're home to a thousand new people every day, and that means more cars, truck and buses on our roads. You often hear TxDOT talk about that growth in terms of road capacity, but it affects everything we do from transit to maintenance to the license plates we all put on our cars."

The Texas Department of Transportation

The Texas Department of Transportation is responsible for maintaining nearly 80,000 miles of road and for supporting aviation, rail and public transportation across the state. TxDOT and its 15,000 employees strive to empower local leaders to solve local transportation problems, and to use new financial tools, including tolling and public-private partnerships, to reduce congestion and pave the way for future economic growth while enhancing safety, improving air quality and increasing the value of the state’s transportation assets. Find out more at www.txdot.gov (http://www.txdot.gov/ ).