In touting the “reinvented” Camry, a new Toyota commercial also envisions a revamped Department of Motor Vehicles.
In it, happy customers play video games and mini-golf and enjoy ice cream cones served by a smiling bureaucrat. A narrator describes the office as “a little nicer.”
In Denver, Mayor Michael Hancock isn’t going for nicer at the DMV as much as he is hoping for faster.
Hancock this week announced he would waive four furlough days for DMV employees in order to “improve customer service.” It’s a short-term step that serves as a good example of a longer-term effort to improve effectiveness across city government.
Peak Performance, which is the administration’s effort to bring business-management practices to the public sector, is underway in eight departments and should be in place across the city by the end of the year.
The effort identified ongoing problems at the DMV early on.
Three years ago, the average wait time at Denver’s four offices — which process registrations, license plates, temporary tags and titles — was 13 minutes. The average wait time last year was 52 minutes.
At the same time, the number of unprocessed mail and online renewals each month grew from several hundred to thousands. The backlog prompted many people — fleet managers and car-rental companies among them — who could have opted for online or mail renewal to send people to stand in line instead.
Add in the furlough days, which city workers have been taking for about four years, and the snowball was rolling right along.
Administration officials now realize money saved on furloughs (about $55,000 annually for the DMV) is offset by overtime payments as they try to reduce backlogged cases.
David Edinger, head of the Peak Performance effort, called the decision to scrap DMV furloughs a “brute force” fix.
And while the aim is to reduce both the backlog and wait times in the near term, no one believes that eliminating furloughs alone will return service to 2009 levels.
Part of that is simply staffing. In 2009, the DMV employed 57 people and handled almost 350,000 registration renewals. With jobs going unfilled to save money, 46 employees processed 352,383 renewals in 2011. The city would like to have 53 employees in the DMV by the end of May, but the challenge of “doing more with less” remains.
That’s why we hold out hope for the Peak Performance plan to set goals for service and measure performance.
DMV officials know they must become more efficient and are developing plans — increasing the number of people who renew via the Web or mail, for example — to get there.
It’s unlikely that Denver will ever see video games or ice cream in its DMV offices, but residents should expect improvement there — and across city government — as the Hancock administration drives on with its performance initiative.
