Switch to Telephone Appointments Creates ‘Crisis’ : DMV Caught in a Monster Traffic Jam

In most field offices of the state Department of Motor Vehicles, workers toil within an enclosure formed by three counters and a back wall. The public is kept outside of this perimeter, massing in sloppy ranks to wait a turn at the counter. In both form and function, the design is suggestive of a fort.

Branch managers are under orders to stay out among the troops, so they usually sit against the wall at a desk distinguished by an 8-by-11-inch photograph hung overhead. It is a portrait of Gov. George Deukmejian, grinning. Often, and particularly in these days of hectic change at the DMV, his is the only smile in the house.

“Fun?” asked Herman Gupton, 52, who manages the San Francisco DMV branch. “It’s not so much fun right now, because of all the pressure in trying to make a program work that had bugs in it from the inception . . . pressure from within and without. I hope it gets to be fun. I hope I don’t have to spend the rest of my career fighting alligators, so to speak.”

The primary alligator confronting Gupton and his counterparts at the DMV’s 154 field offices surfaced last summer in Sacramento with the announcement that the department would no longer deal with its clientele on a first-come, first-served basis. Instead, the public would be required to schedule appointments in advance by telephone.

The new policy, which applies to virtually all DMV transactions, took effect Aug. 6. What has transpired since can be described as a rough transition at best, a bureaucratic fiasco at worst.

“The appointment system quite frankly has put us in a crisis situation,” said Thomas R. Weibel, an official in the DMV’s Sacramento headquarters. “We are getting some heat.”

The system’s major flaw became apparent early, and it was so simple that it seemed stunning: Most major field offices did not have enough telephones to make a telephone appointment system work.

People who called for an appointment often discovered that they couldn’t get through, so they went to the DMV in person. Because clerks had been instructed to serve only those with appointments, many walk-ins were turned away or given appointments for another day.

Complaints Came Quickly

It did not take long for complaints to pour in, more than a few reaching the man whose smile decorates DMV walls.

“Dear Governor Deukmejian,” wrote Elaine L. Boyd, a legal secretary who lives in Lake San Marcos in north San Diego County. “This new ‘brilliant’ system of making appointments for renewal simply DOES NOT WORK! . . . This is the most inexcusable, inefficient and frustrating system that could possibly have been implemented! This is what happens in the Real World when one tries to call DMV for an appointment (as I have for the past three days): A BUSY SIGNAL.”

While DMV officials insist that they have made great strides with the system, it was possible two Mondays ago to observe people waiting for an hour in the Santa Monica branch to make an appointment to return in two weeks--and all so they could pay what essentially are taxes.

“Of course it makes me mad,” said Caroline Aezrapour, a 24-year-old computer programmer who was on her second trip to the branch to register her car. She had arrived for her appointment an hour earlier. “It’s very slow,” she said. “Coming to the DMV is always a headache. The old system was just the same.”

Arrived Early

Andrew Varni, 24, showed up for his appointment 10 minutes early. He was rewarded with a 1-hour wait and the grim news that he would need to return with additional registration paper work. “I was here a few years ago,” Varni said, “before they had the appointment system. And I got through faster.”

Dorothy Caruso was at the end of a line of 15 people waiting in front of the “Start Here” window. Under the new system, this is where people without appointments are funneled. In some cases they move next to benches where they wait to be squeezed in between appointments, a process that can consume an entire day. Most, however, are given appointments for another date. Nearly all of the business at the Start Here window could have been accomplished over the telephone--if it were possible to get through.

“I tried calling for six weeks,” said Caruso, 42, a schoolteacher. “I sat on the phone. One day I called for five hours straight. I kept track.”

Because her newly purchased used car did not have license plates, she began to get tickets. She went in person to the DMV. This was her third trip.

“It stinks,” Caruso said of the new system. “This is the most inefficient, slow, snail-like, inefficient, incompetent, anything-you-want-to-call-it situation. It’s maddening. It’s like you get caught in a snare they create, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

In the beginning, there was the noble goal. And it was a dilly.

After long enduring criticism as what is arguably California’s least-loved bureaucracy, the DMV decided to do something about its service. Lines at major branches were spilling out of lobbies and into the streets. Customers were known to wait as long as four hours. It was a mess.

This, of course, comes as no surprise to most Californians. There are nearly 17 million licensed drivers in the state and 20 million registered vehicles, and the issuance of every license involves some contact with the DMV.

The DMV also had a pragmatic motivation to find a better system. It had begun a $42-million conversion to computers. Terminals were being installed in field offices to process work formerly completed in Sacramento. Entry into the electronic age, ironically enough, was expected to lengthen the time needed to take care of clients at the field office.

Further Deterioration Seen

“The scope of the project,” DMV Director George E. Meese wrote in a report to Deukmejian, “would literally affect every facet of daily operation. And, without some well-defined method of controlling the work flow, the already-diminished service levels would deteriorate even further.”

So why not forget the computers and telephone systems and simply add more clerks?

“That,” Meese said in an interview, “would just be a never-ending battle of having more and more employees, more and more offices, larger offices, larger parking lots. If you could tell me tomorrow that no one else was going to come into California, then we might be able to do something like that.”

After the goal came the innovation. The Santa Barbara DMV branch had solved a temporary parking shortage by requiring appointments. Why, the bureaucrats in Sacramento asked themselves, couldn’t this concept be applied statewide? Their response apparently was unanimous: Why not, indeed!

Minimizing Visits

The system requires a customer to first contact an office by telephone. A DMV operator determines which forms the customer needs, and these are sent by mail. If a visit to the office is still needed, an appointment is scheduled. But the emphasis is on keeping office visits to a minimum.

A six-month pilot project was conducted in 24 Southern California offices early last year. It demonstrated to the bureaucrats’ satisfaction that the new policy would be nothing short of splendid. “The appointment system,” an evaluation concluded, “has reduced both customer wait time and the number of customer visits to the field offices.”

In retrospect, DMV officials now concede that the pilot study was not a solid test. Some offices had a central telephone system to divert pressure, and it was possible for customers to go to neighboring offices not involved in the trial system.

Nonetheless, out of the project a formula was developed to determine how many telephones were needed to accommodate the new system. The recommended lines were added. And on Aug. 6 a new day dawned for the DMV. And it was not good.

‘Grossly Underestimated’

“We found out very quickly--very quickly--that the project telephone formulas were grossly underestimated,” said Bill Cather, a DMV official in Sacramento.

Telephones were inundated, not only with legitimate calls but also, Meese said, with “those who were merely interested in discussing the pros and cons of the new system.”

In some cities, the problem was not placing a call but finding the right number. Telephone information operators did not have the numbers, and they were not printed in phone books.

In other branches, efforts to quickly install new lines were hampered by confusion stemming from the break-up of AT&T; and because some DMV switchboards were outdated.

New Experience

Working on the telephone was something new to most DMV employees. In the past, there had been a strict policy banning any business over the telephone. Workers were known to let phones ring or--in hectic times--take them off the hook. So there was initially some employee resistance as well, officials said.

When frustrated callers began to arrive at the field offices in droves, some managers reacted by taking operators and throwing them into the front lines at the counters. But this created only more difficulty for callers.

In the meantime, the conversion to computers was having its anticipated effect on the speed of individual transactions. And thousands of hours of worker time were being spent in training on the computers, taxing the increasingly burdened staffs.

“I don’t know, in retrospect, whether we should have done both changes at the same time,” DMV official Weibel said.

Computers Slowed Process

Because the computers were slowing things down, fewer appointments could be scheduled each day, and some customers waited a month for an appointment. Taking care of DMV business is not something many citizens do a month in advance, and so the branches began to fill with the ranks of the unscheduled, all pleading emergency.

A decision had been made that the only way to make the appointment system work would be to apply it statewide, without exceptions. Some clerks enforced this with a vengeance.

Laurel Britton, an aide to Assemblyman Phillip D. Wyman (R-Tehachapi), heard from constituents who drove 40 miles from the foothills or farming communities in the San Joaquin Valley to conduct DMV business in Bakersfield. “They would drive their trucks down canyons on wiggly roads and then literally be told that they had to have an appointment,” Britton said.

Turned away empty-handed, they would spend the drive home planning angry letters to send to the usual recipients.

High Public Resistance

Public resistance to the system has been high. Even in offices in which the system is said to be working the best, managers estimate that between 30% to 50% of customers do not have appointments. Some of this, no doubt, stems from ignorance about the change. But DMV officials also have discovered that some people don’t want to make appointments to visit a government office.

“While most Californians appreciate the convenience of appointments,” Meese said, “they quite often perceive the appointment programs to be an infringement upon their right to prompt service.”

The public reaction to appointments surprised department officials, who tend to compare the system to that found at almost any doctor’s office.

“We are not in the business of trying to ram things down people’s throats, although we have been accused of that,” Weibel said. “We anticipated most people would appreciate the opportunity to avoid coming into a DMV office.

“We had heard the complaints about long lines and the bureaucracy for so many years. We thought, ‘Well, this is wonderful.’ ”

Tough Times

The transition has created tough times for DMV field office workers and managers. Under the old system, clients would get mad waiting in line. Now, they often have their anger up even before they hit the door.

“We have been dealing with the situation at DMV since last fall,” said Keith Hearn, communications director of the California State Employees Assn., which represents most of the department’s 7,000 employees. “The main problem is that there is considerable stress on the employees. A lot of them are demoralized due to trying to get the public through the system as fast as possible. . . .

“Another major problem is forced overtime. A lot of these offices have been on mandatory overtime for the past year. This really gets to a lot of people. Last Christmas holiday, a lot of people had scheduled vacations to be with their families, and they had them canceled due to the workload.”

Managers Irritated

Some managers interviewed recalled with irritation their difficulties convincing Sacramento that the new system was in trouble. They believed that their superiors suspected them of loafing, causing problems for what appeared to be an ideal system.

Last year, managers received memos instructing them to place their “most knowledgeable and proficient people” on the new computers.

Then, as the appointment system began, they received memos telling them to put their “most knowledgeable and proficient people” on the telephone banks.

As it became clear that the “Start Here” windows were needed to sort out the large number of clients arriving without appointments, instructions came down for the managers to put their “most knowledgeable and proficient people” at that start window.

‘A Standing Joke’

“That became a standing joke among managers,” recalled one Sacramento DMV official. “They were saying, ‘I ran out of knowledgeable and proficient people back in the automation phase.’ ”

DMV official Cather said that while most managers defend the system publicly, “a lot . . . would like to see us go back to the old ways and say, ‘We gave it a good shot but this just isn’t going to work out.’ They are not happy. They are tired of fielding complaints.”

While nobody is suggesting as yet that the system--now in its eighth month--has begun to operate as smoothly as first hoped, the latest word at the DMV is that the toughest period has passed.

“The light at the end of the tunnel is that it is getting better every day,” said Toni Gilbert, a DMV regional manager in Long Beach.

Meese said that he expects the system to be working as planned in 30 to 90 days. The goal is to make it reasonably easy to place a call to a field office, schedule appointments within five days and provide service within 15 minutes.

Branches where the system is now said to be working best include the ones hardest hit at first--the downtown Los Angeles branch on Hope Street and Gupton’s office on Fell Street in San Francisco.

Extra Lines Installed

Hundreds of additional telephone lines have been installed since August. Some troubled offices have been given devices to stack up calls on hold, the same as those employed by airline reservations systems. Another $500,000 worth of these call sequencers are on order.

The appointment system originally was supposed to cost $860,000 to implement. That amount has been exceeded, but officials said they cannot estimate by how much.

While they refuse to entertain any discussion that the system be abandoned, Meese and his top officials have lowered their expectations about overnight efficiency and prompt public acceptance. Instead, they appear resigned to a long haul.

No Immediate Compliance

“It has become quite clear,” Meese stated in a report presented earlier this year to Deukmejian, “that if we are to reach our ultimate goal of complete public acceptance of the appointment system, we cannot demand immediate compliance. “

Adjustments have been made.

Signs on doors of DMV field offices still declare that appointments are mandatory, but some managers have made exceptions since the first day. For instance, Gupton allows people who have lost their license to receive service even without an appointment.

Rural offices have been told to consider the appointment system voluntary.

In late February, Meese distributed a flyer to all branches that set down this order: “Everyone entering a DMV field office is to be served. Appointments are tools for better service. WE DO NOT EXIST to make appointments. The DMV exists to SERVE THE PUBLIC.”

At the height of the crisis, which probably peaked in late January, DMV officials heard regularly from state lawmakers who wanted to relay complaints from constituents and ask, as one department official recalled: “What are you turkeys trying to do?’ ”

Legislative interest has dwindled, however. One lawmaker scoffed at recent inquiries, saying, “It’s just not the major issue of the day.”

Perhaps one reason for the Legislature’s short interest span rests in the basement of the Capitol Building, Room B-101--a tiny DMV office. That is where many lawmakers and their aides take care of personal DMV transactions.

A reporter dropped in one March morning and found no lines whatsoever.

He asked to renew his license, but was told he must be employed by the Legislature. When he admitted he was not, the would-be renewal applicant was dispatched with a slip of paper. It contained a typed list of telephone numbers. The numbers, it was indicated, should be called in order to schedule appointments at regular DMV field offices in Sacramento.