Long lines plagued the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Georgetown Thursday as the department reopened after shutting down the previous week to install a computer system intended to speed things up.
Some people had 90-minute to two-hour waits in the afternoon. Earlier in the day, the building was packed and the wait was longer.
Thirty offices throughout the state were closed last week and Monday to upgrade the DMV’s aged computers and change to a new database system. The Georgetown office reopened Wednesday.
May Thomas from North Santee and her daughter came to Georgetown after lunch so the daughter could get her driver’s license. Thomas said the hour-and-a-half wait “wasn’t too bad.”
“It seemed to be moving along. It’s getting to be towards evening,” Thomas said. “Most of the people have been out this morning.”
“Some of the other people earlier today said it was crowded,” Thomas noted.
Margaret Port was waiting on her daughter, too. She said the two-hour wait “is about the same as before.” The Pleasant Hill area resident said they came in about a month ago for her daughter’s first license test, and had to wait about the same amount of time.
Paul Britton Jr., who lives in the Browns Ferry area, came in for the fourth time to get his license renewed. It had been suspended.
He was one of about 50 people at the DMV office. When he went by early Wednesday morning “it was crowded then, about 9 to 10:30 a.m. It was about triple this
See DMV, Page 2

number,” Britton said.
Employees told him, “there was a delay in Columbia. They seem to be getting the old stuff out and the new stuff in,” Britton said. “They’re getting people in and out otherwise. It’s a lot better than it was (Wednesday) morning.”
DMV is a part of the state Department of Public Safety. Sid Gaulden, DPS spokesman, said there were about 110 million documents that had to be sorted, validated, purged and then transferred as part of “Project Phoenix.”
“I’m just going to be patient and wait it out a little while longer,” Britton said late Wednesday. “Maybe they’ll get it right in Columbia.”
Teresa Green is manager of the local DMV office in Georgetown. She declined a request for an interview with the Times.
According to Gaulden, six offices opened in major cities around the state last Monday. Georgetown was among 30 that opened Wednesday, and the rest of the offices in the state opened Thursday.
Those having business in the offices that opened earlier in the week had about four- to five-hour waits Monday, and about 90 minutes Tuesday, Gaulden said. The transfer of all those documents “apparently is working better than we expected,” he said.
Many of the people who went to DMV offices Monday and Tuesday didn’t need to be there, Gaulden said.
“The law allows up to 45 days to register a new vehicle. We also had people coming in to get stickers to show they have renewed their license,” he said, and that can be done at the county tax office. “People can keep that receipt in their car until the local office mails you a sticker,” Gaulden said.
“That created a second problem. Folks who don’t need to be there, and are bound and determined to wait, keeps them there longer,” he said.
Newspapers, radio and television all publicized the closings and computer upgrades, Gaulden said, “yet we still had people coming in the offices saying they didn’t know about it.”
“If it was a system problem, we would have been shut down totally. We wouldn’t have been able to do anything. The system is working,” Gaulden said.
He didn’t know of any major problems around the state, and said he wasn’t sure what the Georgetown employees were telling people about.
Once DMV employees get past the learning curve, Gaulden said the renewal process should run more smoothly.
Project Phoenix has been under way for the past four years, and will take a few more to complete. In addition to computer hardware and software, DMV wants to upgrade facilities, procedures and has already increased and standardized employee training.
“If you go into the Georgetown office on a regular basis, you will notice that all those spaces are not manned.” Gaulden said working the counter at DMV offices is a stressful job that doesn’t pay as well as it should.
“That makes it hard to retain those good employees who are adept at picking up what they need to do. They get training in that system, and they realize they can better themselves by going elsewhere,” he said. Beginning pay is about $17,000-$18,000 per year.
Some of the facilities around the state are old, crowded and in need of modernizing or replacement, Gaulden noted. With the state budget as tight as it is, though, there’s not a whole lot of money to build new buildings.
People who would like to get more information about Project Phoenix can visit the state Department of Public Safety website at www.scdps.org, Gaulden said.

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