Most of us who’ve had to visit a Secretary of State’s office to renew your driver’s license, get auto tabs or transact other business know that most of them operate with Soviet-style efficiency. As a matter of fact, the last time I had to get my license renewed I got through nearly a hundred pages of a Russian novel while I waited on a hard metal chair.
New Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson evidently knew something about that. To her credit, after she took office she embarked on a mission to visit all 131 branch offices to see for herself. Yesterday, she announced that what she had found was, according to the highly respected Gongwer News Service, “devastating, heartbreaking” and “unacceptable.”
When she was running, she pledged that she would streamline the system so that customers could get in and out in 30 minutes, a guarantee much like Mike Duggan’s when he was running the Detroit Medical Center. Except she’s now had to put the brakes on it.
“We inherited a broken system,” she told reporters. A third of the state’s self-service kiosks aren’t working, the rest have limited capacity, and, she admitted, are too hard to use.
On top of that, many of the branch offices are not equipped to handle the number of people who come in, and are overwhelmed.
Secretary Benson did pledge to work hard towards being able to have that 30-minute guarantee in place by the end of 2022, the year she’ll be up for reelection.
What you have to wonder is where the news media has been, and why this problem had gotten so little attention? The general impression was that the last secretary, Ruth Johnson had done a stellar job. My guess is that Johnson may have received a pass from the media because she was willing to try to buck the hard-right legislature on certain issues, such as disclosure of campaign contributions and expanded absentee voting.
In any event, you can expect them to be watching Benson’s progress in fixing things. However, I can report there may be another problem of which she may be unaware.
My birthday was recently, and a couple days before, I realized that the state had never sent me my car registration renewal forms. For the last several years, I’ve been going to a Secretary of State branch in Charlevoix, because it is far less crowded.
That’s where they issued me a license plate two years ago, after they told me I needed a new one because I’d had the old one ten years. Last year, they sent me the registration renewal as usual, about a month before my birthday, but this year nothing.
The manager was extremely kind, and helpful … and informed me that there was no record of me ever having the license plate they had given me. What’s more, she said they had given the same plate to someone else. “How could that happen?” I said.
She told me they’d put in a new computer program in February, and a bunch of information had been lost. Unfortunately, the new program wouldn’t let her give me a new plate either, and since it showed I hadn’t had a current plate for two years, it said one could only be issued if I sold the car to someone else. I was not pleased by this.
Fortunately, she was willing to call Lansing, someone presumably overrode the program, and several hours later they issued me a new plate. I was very happy I hadn’t gone to a crowded urban center – but I also know there are many people who have no choice.
I also got the willies when I thought that someone out there (an ax murderer?) had been driving around with the same license plate I have. By the way, I emailed a public relations person for the secretary of state’s office, and never got a response.
So, Secretary Benson, this might be something else worth checking into. And if you are a normal citizen reading this and your registration renewal hasn’t shown up… you may want to find a less crowded branch office with a sympathetic clerk … pronto.
