DMV – RI Future

March 23, 2016March 25, 2016

State House licenses for all rally gets loud

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Providing licenses for undocumented immigrants in Rhode Island is an idea that is not going away. After Governor Gina Raimondo failed to deliver on her campaign promise to issue an executive order allowing the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to issue operator licenses to undocumented immigrants, the General Assembly took up the issue at the Governor’s request. Bills were introduced in the House and Senate. The House bill was heard by the Judiciary committee and held for further study.

Todos Somo Arizona (TSAZ) is a coalition of groups including Jobs with Justice, English for Action, Fuerza Laboral, Comite de Inmigrantes, RI Interfaith Coalition, 32BJSEIU RI, AFCS, Estudios Biblicos and ONA, that is holding a series of actions at the State House to keep attention focused on the issue and on Tuesday activists were loud and their presence was felt, even in the midst of a Second Amendment Rights rally happening at roughly the same time.

At least 400 2nd Amendment Coalition members turned out to pressure the House Judiciary Committee on a raft of bills being heard concerning guns. Nearly 100 members of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence (RICAGV) turned out to have their say on the bills as well.

This lead to some friction, like when former candidate for Mayor of Warwick Stacia Huyler decided to chide the Licenses for All coalition for being too loud. The irony of a Second Amendment activist complaining about people using their First Amendment rights was lost on Huyler.

The issue of granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants is not going away. Everyone, regardless of status, deserves to be allowed to function in our society, and until this becomes the law in Rhode Island, these protests will continue.

Here’s all of this year’s coverage of the issue from RI Future:

2016-03-22 Licenses 020 — Mike Araujo- RI Jobs with Justice

February 18, 2015February 19, 2015

Hard times at the DMV getting a non-driving state ID

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I live-tweeted the experience of getting a state ID sometimes under the hashtag #Paisleygate, a joke on the fact that I wore the same weird paisley shirt to get my last ID in Pennsylvania as I did when I went to get my Rhode Island ID earlier this week. But the broken process of getting a state ID card if you aren’t a driver or already a Rhode Islander is no joke.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567699862305533952

It took me two separate bus trips to-and-from the Pastore Center in Cranston from where I live in Providence. This was after a year of wrangling to get other pieces of paperwork like an original of my birth certificate – I only had copies – which are difficult to obtain without a valid ID.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567734538894589952

A couple things I’ve learned:

1. You cannot get a non-drivers’ state ID from any of the in-city locations. You have to go to the John Pastore Center on the Cranston/Warwick line, which for non-drivers is quite a hike on an infrequent bus. The clerk at the DMV made it clear to me that if I had been a driver and had a drivers license that was expired, it would have been no problem for me to use it as a supporting document, but that because I only had a non-drivers’ ID, I couldn’t. Location and process are really tilted against non-drivers.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567736001498726401

2. The cost of the ID itself is pretty significant: $26.50, with a $1.50 charge if you use a debit card. The cost of a drivers’ license is somewhat higher, but the gap is pretty small. There was a great analysis of how many states have an apparent gas tax, which is then exempt from sales tax, and how this exemption inflates the value of the gas tax. The cost to get a drivers license should be looked at in the same way, since the base cost for an ID is so high. An ID fee is like a sales tax–maybe worse, really–because it charges people for the basic cost of being part of the workforce or voting, whereas a license fee presumably covers the cost of testing and administering road safety.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567747700742172672

3. You must have originals! Don’t even bother trying to talk your way into a voter ID with photocopies, even if they’re accompanied by other documents, like college IDs, FBI background checks, BCIs, Medicaid cards, library cards, etc.

4. As a Warden of Elections, I’ve been instructed many times at trainings to turn away people with IDs that are unexpired and valid but not from Rhode Island, even if those people have corresponding documents to prove their Rhode Island addresses.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567735350651781120

5. Unless you have everything together perfectly, this whole process is going to cost you a lot of time. I’ve had copies of things like my birth certificate lying around the house for years for whenever I’ve had to start a job, but since I had to get an original, and didn’t have a non-expired ID, it took me about a year and a lot of interventions from family to get the new stuff in order. And because of the remote location of the Pastore Center, getting an ID as a non-driver means essentially taking a day off. The Center also closes at 3:15 PM, which is kind of ridiculous too. I brought the wrong paperwork the first time, so I actually made two trips back-and-forth by bus, racing against time with the ridiculous closing time and infrequent bus schedule.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567746753483776002

How can we reform this? My thoughts:

1. A state ID should be available in urban locations. There are centers where one can go to renew existing IDs, but not to get new ones.

2. A state ID from someplace else should be as useful to getting a new ID as a drivers’ license from somewhere else is. This distinction is inequitable, and silly.

3. State IDs should be free.

4. Duplicates should be allowed, or at least a broader array of paperwork types.

5. One should be able to get an ID at night or on weekends. The Pastore Center closes at 3:15 PM! Possibly changing the ID process so that it isn’t taken on by the DMV would make sense, since identification for voting and working purposes is an entirely separate thing than driving.

The voter ID process and documentation needed for working has been something I’ve been aware of intellectually for some time, but going through the process really changed my perspective on it in ways that I didn’t expect. We have to change this if we’re going to stop disenfranchising people year after year.

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March 15, 2012March 15, 2012

Budgeting for Disaster VI: DMV Manages for Success

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One part of the Department of Administration that gets a lot of press is the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is actually a unit of the Department of Revenue. DMV, of course, gets press because people don’t like it, and the lines are long, and it’s in an inconvenient place, and so on and on.

Over last spring and summer, the agency saw a turnaround. Spurred on by stories of multiple-hour wait times, Governor Chafee appointed a new director, who made some management changes, shuffled people around, re-engineered the lines, put “greeters” out front to explain things, closed some satellite branches, and generally shook things up. Lo and behold, the wait times plummeted. An inspiring tale of how good management can make all the difference? A story of re-inventing government to do more with less in the 21st century? Well sort of, but not quite.

Watching the ticking clock in line at DMV has been a part of life for all of us in Rhode Island for a long time, but it’s not right to say that it’s been a neglected problem. Lincoln Almond suggested adding $300,000 per year to expand their hours, and Don Carcieri made a point of “fixing” it, too. He even listed new efficiencies and reduced wait times as one of his accomplishments in a 2004 interview.

But time went on and service decayed until it took hours just for routine business to happen. I waited there with my daughter for three excruciating hours one fine day in 2010, along with about three hundred good friends. By the time Lincoln Chafee took office, DMV was a joke, a travesty of government service. Chafee brought in a new interim director, Lisa Holley, to troubleshoot the agency, and — what do you know? — she got results. Wait times shrank dramatically and while it’s still hard to describe a visit to the DMV as a pleasure, the last time I was in one, last August, I was in and out in 25 minutes.

So what happened? What management magic did Holley bring to the agency? What lessons can we learn? Mostly just that it takes people to do the work.

In the dark days of 2004, when Don Carcieri was taking credit for improving wait times, he was adding employees, and adding satellite locations. You can see the progress in the graph to the right, which counts customer service representatives in the department. Service got better with the new workers, and a little worse with the satellite offices. But then around 2006, Carcieri decided it was ok to let the service decay a little bit. He said the state had too many employees, and he started to enforce the statewide hiring freeze on DMV. And then the retirement fiasco of 2009 came, and a bunch of people left, and so in 2010 you had all the satellite locations, and 22% fewer people to stand behind all those desks.

And that’s the crazy thing about management by attrition: you don’t get to plan for the loss of people. Carcieri simply said we’re not hiring any new people and we’re going to encourage people to retire, and that’s that. The only surprise was that people were surprised that service suffered — a lot.

So again, what management magic did Holley bring? She insisted on having more people, that’s what. Chafee asked the Assembly for 25 new workers. They balked, but they did cough up some, and so now there are almost as many people on the customer-facing staff as there were in 2006, at half as many locations. Of course there were some other improvements: line management systems, those greeters, a redivision of labor. But sometimes the big story is the simpler one: we got better service with more people.

There is another story I see lurking here. Governor Chafee saw a problem of poor service and acted to fix it, while Governor Carcieri saw the problem in terms of taxes, and acted to fix that instead, mostly by giving tax cuts to rich people. How did that work out for you?

There is one other feature to the DMV budget that should not go unremarked while we’re here. The RIMS computer system that was supposed to create a whole new class of efficiencies by getting all of DMV’s information about you in a single database is quite a bit behind schedule and over budget. This is pretty much SOP in the database development world, public and private. That is, it’s a shame and a waste of state dollars, but it’s not exactly unprecedented. I bring it up at least in part because you can’t exactly see it in the budget presentation, but you can see it in the Capital Budget, which we’ll get to soon.

NEXT: The Quasi-Publics
Read the previous posts in this series