I watch almost zero non-sports television, but when I noticed that a sitcom called “DMV” — for Department of Motor Vehicles — was debuting on CBS last fall, I couldn’t resist checking out an episode or two. Even more than most Americans, I had some history with the subject, and its potential for humor.
Set in “the place everyone dreads going most,” the show had the expected standing-room-only waiting rooms, the frustrated customers (“Did you realize your job is to ruin people’s lives?”) and indolent, indifferent staff (“What do I like most about working here? The constant rush of superiority”).
Watching enough to get the gist, I found two thoughts occurred. Why are state DMVs still a laughingstock? And, there’s a lesson — and an opportunity — here for today’s politicians, especially those of the “progressive” mindset.
Like most basic, necessary services of government, motor vehicle administration is often atrocious, but it needn’t be.
Two decades back, while I competed to displace a long-standing Indiana political establishment, making fun of the state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles was a fixture of my stock speech.
Lines like “People go to the BMV with a box lunch and a copy of ‘War and Peace’ and hope not to finish both before someone notices they’re there” never failed to draw a knowing guffaw. Or, alluding to our bureau’s much-publicized fraud problems, “How’d they know they’d captured the real Saddam Hussein? They found his Indiana driver’s license.”
Arriving in office, our team made ending such sarcasm an immediate priority. We believed that, if we could ever fix this sore-thumb emblem of government dysfunction, which virtually every citizen encounters firsthand, we could earn credibility for larger reforms.
It wasn’t complicated. We hired a former retail CEO, who quickly closed about 40 branches with little traffic and used the savings to open new ones where lines were long, and to build a best-in-class computer system that quickly began obviating the need for many people to go a branch at all.
We consulted Disney experts on how to design branches for a more pleasant customer experience. Staff pay and promotion were linked tightly to performance, primarily length-of-visit times and customer satisfaction ratings.
By the third year, visit times were below 10 minutes, customer satisfaction was in the high 90s, and the BMV was winning awards. To this day, citizens bring up the transformation to me; I often say that if I should ever warrant a tombstone, it will say “He fathered four great daughters and fixed the BMV.”
Many other states have achieved similar improvements. Rating methods vary, but Arizona, Colorado and Virginia draw frequent mentions. But others struggle — North Carolina last year had a statewide average DMV wait time of two hours and 45 minutes, but with wide variations from office to office. Fewer than half the states have achieved even basic digitization of services. CBS’s sitcom may or may not have a long run, but the jokes will continue.
A larger issue looms behind these governmental shortcomings. The more change a public administration aspires to make, the more important the quality of highly visible, firsthand services becomes.
Today’s leftists are slow learners — witness their struggles to show respect for those of different cultural outlooks. But it has begun to dawn on the brightest of them that insisting on, and delivering, real results on government fundamentals is a down payment on the credibility required to do bigger things. Wise voices like Matthew Yglesias have been urging their fellow Democrats to reduce housing red tape and practice “sewer socialism” as a proof of fitness.
Joe Klein patiently reminds his readers that obtaining and spending taxpayer dollars is not the end goal. It’s actual results that matter, even if that means exposing the malfeasance and failed performance of public employee unions, the welfare establishment and other big donor client groups.
A good start if you’re, say, a newly elected mayor of a major city, would be to make fixing something highly visible a primary goal, and to let neither ideology nor political alliances get in the way. If you don’t have a broken DMV, maybe it’s an unreliable, decrepit public transit system, or pothole-riddled streets or a fraud-filled welfare system that steals money meant for those you affect to care about so much.
A few years after the reshaping of Indiana’s BMV, a national survey of public trust in state governments found confidence in Indiana’s government at 77 percent, second highest in the country. What went into that involved more than keeping BMV visit times to 10 minutes, but I’ve never doubted that fixing that agency was an essential element. And it plainly created a more receptive environment for a long string of major changes we pursued in other areas.
As a skeptic of today’s super-sized government, I’m not rooting for those who seek to make it even bigger, nosier and more expensive. But in the long run, greater government competence, and rebuilt confidence in public institutions, matters to everyone. Basic service that’s no joke is where to start.
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