I moved away from Hampton, Virginia in 2000, and while I liked the place, I wasn’t sad to no longer have to deal with the Hampton branch of the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. Who knows, maybe it has been improved since the 1990s, but at least in the 1990s it was nothing more than Affirmative Action for special education students. The individual clerks at the stations in the long, long waiting room were ugly, bored, rude and stupid.
Moving to Delaware wasn’t too bad. Small state, and the DMV for New Castle County wasn’t great, but it wasn’t too terribly bad, either. It outclassed Hampton in every way.
Two years later, and Pennsylvania was a dream: license plate issues and renewals were handled by private notaries public, taking half the burden away from the local DMVs. Private businesses have to have polite people, or they go out of business. The Carbon County DMV office was small, and a bit of a pain as it was not open every day, but at least it wasn’t any worse than Delaware’s.
No, this isn’t my license plate, but by having farm plates, I get a slight break on my vehicle insurance. pla
Then, back to the Bluegrass State, and driver’s licenses were reissued by circuit court clerks. I renewed mine just last month; no line at all, just go up and get it reissued.
Alas! When I read this story, visions of the Hampton DMV flashed into my mind:
Kentucky circuit court clerks to no longer issue, renew driver’s licenses
By Katey Cook | June 30, 2021 | 9:36 PM EDT
FRANKFORT, Ky. (WBKO) – Getting your driver’s license, or getting it renewed, at your local circuit court clerk’s office will soon be phased out completely in Kentucky. You will instead have to go to a regional Kentucky Transportation Cabinet regional office or renew online.
Several counties have already made this switch. KYTC officials said 40 counties will have phased out of using circuit clerk’s for driver’s license-related needs by the end of July, 60 by the end of September, and by June 30 of 2022, all Kentuckians will have to go to a KYTC regional office to get their license renewed or issued.
Currently, there are 18 regional offices in the state. You can find a full list of them here. KYTC officials explained this transition is happening because of the new license issuance system that involves issuing REAL IDs, The new system would put too much of a workload on circuit clerks.
“They were already kind of overworked, the dockets are bursting at the seams,” Matt Cole with KYTC said. “So you know, it didn’t take long for us to go down that conversation to logically see that it didn’t make sense to put that burden on them.”
In the Bluegrass State, circuit court clerks are elected officials, as are the county clerks, who issue license plates. It behooves them to provide good, polite service if they want to keep their jobs!
The Secretary of the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is appointed by the Governor, and the regional KYTC offices will be staffed by bureaucrats, with the only elected official responsible to the public being the Governor. I can only hope that the staffers at these regional offices won’t be as rude, slow and stupid as the ones at the Hampton DMV.