DMV will soon offer telephone, Internet service alternatives

Thursday, April 13, 2000 | 10:41 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The state Department of Motor Vehicles and Public Safety is cautioning the public not to expect miracles when it starts accepting renewals of driver's licenses and car registration over the Internet and the telephone.

The program is the next step in the DMV's efforts to reduce waiting times, which were being counted in hours following the installation last year of a new computer system known as Genesis.

"This is not going to shorten our lines overnight," Deputy Director Ginny Lewis said of the Internet and phone program Wednesday.

She said the two new systems won't change the behavior of some people who still want to personally visit the offices.

Lewis told a legislative oversight committee Wednesday that about 5 percent or 90,000 of the 1.8 million transactions the department annually handles will be done with the new programs.

Arizona, which has had such a system for several years, gets only 11 percent of its vehicle registration and driver's license business through the new technology, she said. Massachusetts records a 6 percent use after 3 1/2 year.

Those states, Lewis said, experienced a lower than expected rate probably because consumers lacked a personal computer, a credit card or they were concerned with privacy issues.

The waiting time for customers has been going down recently as new employees finish training periods.

Charts prepared by the department show that the average waiting time at the West Flamingo Road office in Las Vegas dropped from 2 hours, 43 minutes on Feb. 28 to 1 hour, 34 minutes on March 15. During the same period, the waiting time at the East Sahara Avenue office fell from 1 hour, 41 minutes to 28 minutes.

The wait at the Carey Avenue office in North Las Vegas dropped from two hours to one hour, 15 minutes during the same period. That office will close April 28 for remodeling and is expected to reopen May 22. In the meantime, the employees will be transferred to other offices in Southern Nevada.

The best improvement to shortening the lines, Lewis said, might be in allowing emission stations in Las Vegas and Reno to register vehicles. One station each in Las Vegas and Reno have been selected for a test period.

The goal of the department is to get the waiting time in the offices down to one hour.

But Sen. Bill O'Donnell, R-Las Vegas, said he wants to see it reduced to 15 minutes, which he said was where it was before the installation of Genesis. He suggested the department may need more employees until the new technology catches on.

O'Donnell said that in 1995 the Legislature added 96 employees, which reduced the wait to 15 minutes but since the department hasn't been able to keep pace with the additional 5,000 to 6,000 people a month coming into Southern Nevada.

Although DMV waiting times may be getting shorter, Assemblyman Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas, said handling auto title transfers still lags.

Owen Ritchie, administrator of central services in the department, said it is 50 days behind in processing titles. He said he hoped to have the turnaround down to 14 days by May 17. The goal is a four-day turnaround.

The system was changed to have the title transfers, once handled in Carson City, to be done at the local offices and then shipped to state headquarters.

"This is something new and there is a pretty high error rate," Ritchie said. "There are more errors than we expected at this time."