Santa Ana : DMV Office Closes for Remodeling Job
Come Monday, it will take a bit more driving for Santa Ana motorists to take care of their DMV business.
The Department of Motor Vehicles office at 1330 E. 1st St. closed its doors at 5 p.m. Friday for seven months. During that time, asbestos will be removed from walls, an elevator will be installed, restrooms will be redone to accommodate the handicapped, a new air-conditioning system will be added, and the interior will be repainted.
The services provided by the Santa Ana office will be divided among other offices in the county until the remodeling is finished, according to Jeanne Tibbets, the Santa Ana office manager.
The driver’s license services will move one mile north, to an office building at 1345 N. Grand Ave. The temporary office will have about half of the 58 Santa Ana employees there to issue licenses and California identification cards, Tibbets said. Although the temporary Santa Ana office will administer the written driver’s license test, no road tests will be given there. Drivers will have to go to one of the other DMV offices--in Westminster, Fullerton or Costa Mesa--to complete that part of the test, Tibbets said.
The auto-registration portion will also be handled by existing DMV offices, and the remainder of the Santa Ana DMV staff will be reassigned to these offices, she said. In order to handle the extra workload, the offices will extend their hours, opening at 7 a.m. and closing at 6 p.m., adding two hours to the usual 8-a.m.-to-5-p.m. day.
The relocation of services during the Santa Ana office’s remodeling is similar to the plan used when the Westminster office was renovated a few years ago.
Tibbets said she hopes that drivers will not be inconvenienced or have to wait in longer lines. “We hope we’ve compensated by the longer hours,” she said. “It should work out because of our experience with the Westminster office. We had their personnel and clients here, and we were able to handle it.”
The addresses for the other offices are 650 West 19th St., Costa Mesa; 909 W. Valencia Drive, Fullerton, and 13700 Hoover St., Westminster.
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