Pub. 1 2019-2020 Issue 3

22 Alisa Reinhardt, Director of Regulatory Affairs, CNCDA T he California DMV is the face of our state govern- ment – it is the single state agency that touches members of the public most often. From vehicle registration renewals and vehicle transfers to driver license renewals and REAL IDs, interacting with the DMV is obligatory for California consumers and businesses trying to take care of personal and commercial business. Despite this constant interaction with the public, the DMV has been widely derided for years as the most systemi- cally inefficient, chronically mismanaged, and operationally dysfunctional of all 235+ state agencies. (The dysfunction at the DMV may only be eclipsed by the previous iteration of our Board of Equalization, the agency which in 2017 was stripped of the majority of its powers in response to years of public scandals involving lavish spending, nepotism, and $350 million in accounting errors.) Former Governor Jerry Brown certainly did not create the multitude of problems at the DMV, but he also did not take concrete steps to fix any of its chronic issues. In contrast, within his first few weeks of taking office now- Governor Gavin Newsom decided to put together a DMV Reinvention Strike Team to dig deep into DMV opera- tions and provide high-level suggestions for how the department could be modernized and improved with an emphasis on transparency, worker performance, speed of service, and overall consumer satisfaction. To lead the Strike Team, Governor Newsom appointed California Government Operations Agency (GovOps) Secretary Marybel Batjer, one of the most accomplished management experts in state government. Her team has spent the last few months meticulously going through a re- cent state audit of the DMV, which presented a number of findings – including soaring wait times at field offices, a “re- active culture,” poor planning, abysmal readiness for new initiatives, and inattention to customer service. In addition to delving into the audit findings, the Strike Team has been interviewing DMV employees from every division to get a closer look at how the Department is operated day-to-day – they are talking to everyone from Division heads all the way down to customer service representatives. The Strike Team recently released some of their less- than-stellar preliminary findings about DMV operations, which include: • A lack of enterprise-wide governance. • Weak communication and lack of goal alignment among divisions. • Key vacancies in top management roles. • Poor coordination in efforts to improve customer service. • A lack of structure in the Information Services Division, which has led to poor prioritization and monitoring of projects. • Outdated and inadequate training and obsolete tools. In response to these observations, the Strike Team launched a series of reinvention efforts: Expand Field Office Alternatives. Expanding service alternatives to field office visits for customers will result in the addition of 100 self-service terminals by mid-2019 and an additional 100 by January 1, 2020. Increase Self-Service Terminal Capabilities. Expanding the range of transactions offered through free-standing self-service terminals will further free up field office staff and save customers time. Initiate Pilot Programs. The Strike Team and DMV are piloting a pop-up DMV service at HealthNet in Sacramento to bring REAL ID services to company employees, with the goal of expanding the pilot to other companies in the future. DMV Reinvention Strike Team: Overhauling California’s Most Troubled State Agency