In March I will travel to Munich on one of Denver’s new nonstop transatlantic flights. The only identification I will need to leave the country and return will be my passport.
Yet my passport alone is not enough to get me a Colorado driver’s license or an official state ID card.
That public policy drove a group of advocates for the homeless to take the state to court.
Last week, a Denver judge ruled that the Colorado Department of Revenue and the Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles did not give the public proper input in deciding what documentation must be presented to get a license or ID.
The ruling has confounded state officials. At first, they threatened to close all DMV offices. Then, they decided to open the DMV without issuing any new driving permits or IDs.
Tim Macdonald, one of the lawyers suing the state, likened this suspension of services to a person “killing their parents and then claiming to be an orphan.”
“My understanding is they had no contingency plan,” Macdonald said of the state’s reaction to the judge’s order.
The craziness persists, but at least Denver Chief Judge Larry Naves has forced Colorado’s leaders to address the lunacy.
John Parvensky of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless called the current process for getting a driver’s license or state ID “Orwellian.” He also mentioned “Catch-22”: You must have two forms of ID to prove you are who you are so you can get another ID to prove who you are.
The lawsuit that led to Naves’ ruling grew out of a project called Homeless Connect. Once a year, all kinds of service providers gather – usually in the Denver convention center – to give homeless people the help they need to get off the streets.
“At the legal section, we kept seeing people who couldn’t get state IDs,” said Macdonald, a Denver lawyer who donated his time at Homeless Connect. “Because they couldn’t get state IDs, it caused a whole host of problems for people getting housing and jobs.”
Macdonald called Colorado’s rules for getting a driver’s license or state ID “the most restrictive and arbitrary in the country.”
“It is,” he claimed, “harder to get a Colorado ID than it is to get a U.S. passport.”
Last Wednesday, 25-year-old Chris McCreary went to the DMV. Homeless for four months, McCreary needs a Colorado ID to get assistance with housing and medical care.
“I showed them my California ID and my delayed-entry-program ID from the Navy,” McCreary said. “They told me the Navy ID had expired. But it doesn’t have an expiration date. They told me to get a birth certificate.”
McCreary is trying. But even that could be a problem the way Colorado’s rules keep changing. McCreary, you see, was born in Texas. According to the state’s website, Texas birth certificates will not be accepted without a second form of ID because Colorado says it has encountered too many fraudulent Texas birth certificates. At the same time, the state website says out-of-state IDs, like the one McCreary has, don’t count as a second ID.
Parvensky was right to invoke George Orwell and Joe Heller. This is as much “1984” as “Catch-22.” McCreary sure looks to be caught in Big Brother’s grasp.
So does Kristen Rohde. The 51-year-old veterinarian is not homeless. She’s a public health supervisor with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The feds trust her to keep the country’s meat supply safe. Meanwhile, the state of Colorado doesn’t trust the disabled military veteran enough to give her a driver’s license.
The first time Rohde went to the DMV, she said she had her military ID.
“They said I had to have my birth certificate,” she recalled.
Rohde went home, dug out her birth certificate and brought it to the DMV.
“They told me the birth certificate was no good because it was endorsed by a city and their rule said it had to be endorsed by a state or county,” she said.
Rohde returned to the DMV a third time Friday with a birth certificate endorsed by the New York Public Health Department.
“They told me I had the right documents, but they couldn’t give me a driver’s license because there was an injunction (against giving licenses).”
Now, that’s a lie. Naves’ temporary injunction doesn’t say the state must stop issuing driver’s licenses and IDs. The injunction says the state “shall not apply the two-document rule or any other requirement not found in statute or validly promulgated regulations.”
Late Friday afternoon, Naves gave the state two more business days to organize itself. Beginning Wednesday, however, it will no longer be able to make folks jump through hoops like circus animals.
That is why the Department of Revenue and its Division of Motor Vehicles found themselves in court in the first place.
State officials keep saying they are simply trying to battle document fraud.
But just ask anybody trying to prove they are who they are in Colorado. There’s nothing simple about any of it.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
