RALEIGH — A Wake County lawmaker called on the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles commissioner to meet local officials over long lines at a motor vehicles office in the southern part of the county.
“This is the Fuquay-Varina DMV one weekday morning recently — completely unacceptable,” Erin Paré (R-Wake) said of a video she posted on the social media platform X. The video shows a line wrapping around the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles (NCDMV) office in Fuqua-Varina.
“I have requested a site visit from DMV Commissioner Wayne Goodwin himself to discuss why our DMV in Fuquay-Varina is short staffed and is not allowed to fill its full complement of authorized positions given the high demand for services and unique complexity of workload,” Paré wrote.
Paré invited Goodwin to meet with her, Fuquay-Varina Mayor Blake Massengill and Holly Springs Mayor Sean Mayefskie at the NCDMV office in question, an offer Goodwin accepted.
In a Facebook post, Paré gave a rundown of the meeting, which she called “productive,” and said that the “management and staff working at our DMV are phenomenal.” She also said in the post that the Fuquay-Varina site manager indicated “population growth and new residents moving to the area from out of state and out of country” were making the workload harder and more time-consuming.
The meeting at the DMV office resulted in at least eight improvement action suggestions, including extending operating hours, including Saturday hours, extending appointment slots throughout the day instead of just mornings, putting out the NCDMV’s Q-Anywhere code starting at opening each day, and discussion of the customer kiosks in operation at the local Harris Teeter.
Additional suggestions included increasing the number of full-time positions at the site, possibly reworking the inside design of the NCDMV to allow for more service desks and more technicians, exploring a larger site for the NCDMV in the area, and exploring an additional NCDMV site for the area.
Goodwin said, according to Paré’s post, the NCDMV is now using an appointment confirmation tool that reminds customers of appointments, and the tool has “resulted in a dramatic decrease in no-shows for appointments.”
Two key areas Paré said she plans to work on immediately are the implementation of the new and modernized statewide computer software system and a data-driven system that would allow the NCDMV to see what sites around the state are experiencing the highest service demands, the complexity of workload, how many and where customers are traveling from due to a lack of available appointments at their typical local office, as well as what functions are most often performed at the site.
“I am frustrated to learn that there really isn’t any formal data-driven system within the Agency that collects data from local units and informs DMV officials about what and where the challenges are,” Paré wrote in the post, adding that the Fuquay-Varina location’s high demand was due to population growth.
“How can the Agency solve problems when there isn’t a tool providing them with the data about what and where the challenges are?” wrote Paré.
The North Carolina House Oversight Committee has conducted two hearings on issues involving the NCDMV this year, one at the end of February and the other in June.
During both hearings, Goodwin was questioned about appointment scheduling issues, long wait times, modernization delays, budget asks and vendor contracts, as well as license plate agency franchising and car dealer licensing.
Frustration with booking teen license appointments was brought up at the February meeting by Sen. Michael Lazzara (R-Onslow), one of the committee’s co-chairs. The Onslow lawmaker gave an example of a law enforcement officer who had to make “multiple trips” and “wait in line for hours” to get his teenagers their driving tests. Lazzara has been a proponent of privatizing the NCDMV.
The June meeting centered on issues with license issuance delays with testimony heard from both Goodwin and Lisa Shoemaker of Idemia, then the state’s license vendor. Discussion included a software glitch resulted in 2,136 customers improperly renewing their licenses between Feb.15-20. The issue resulted in a subsequent backlog of more than 350,000 licenses, with some residents experiencing a two-month wait to receive their licenses.
Goodwin and Shoemaker sparred over who was responsible for the decision to retrieve the improperly issued licenses from some 33,000 already printed cards. The retrieval process halted production from Feb. 20 to March 4.
