Who cut the lines at DMV? (Hint: It’s not the guy who just got credit)

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

Associate Editor

LAST WEEK, Gov. Mark Sanford picked up the endorsement of the Council of Citizens Against Government Waste, which called him “a true taxpayer hero” whose reforms “have saved South Carolina taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.”

The announcement was made at the State Hospital complex on Bull Street to highlight Mr. Sanford’s instrumental role in pushing that property onto the market, paving the way for what could be the most exciting new residential and commercial development in Columbia in our lifetimes.

Bull Street was just one of a string of “cost-saving efforts” the governor’s campaign legitimately claimed credit for in the “Mark Sanford is a tighter wad than Tommy Moore” event. Among the others were renting out the Lace House to help pay for operations at the Governor’s Mansion, selling off unneeded state aircraft, bulking up the Corrections Department’s farm operations to save on prison grocery bills and ordering Cabinet officials to find cheaper lodgings or even buddy-up on overnight trips.

Mr. Moore’s campaign wisely tried to change the subject rather than quibbling. Argue all you want about whether the penny-pinching saves significant money or distracts us from more serious issues, whether bunking the family at the pool house during mansion de-molding was responsible or gimmicky: There simply is no way that Mr. Moore can compete with Mr. Sanford when it comes to “frugality.”

That’s what makes it so curious that both the Sanford campaign and the Washington lobbyist who was in town to grant his group’s endorsement chose to start off their litany of praise with a claim that is at best dubious: that Mr. Sanford slashed the wait time at the DMV.

This isn’t the first time the governor has claimed credit for shortening the lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which had been a division of the independent Public Safety Department before the Legislature moved it under his control in 2003. He’s been hauling it out for a couple of years as an example of how government restructuring would improve our lives. And over time, that claim has become more believable, as the actual sequence of events faded into the recesses of our minds, leaving behind only the bitter memory of hours-long waits that were in fact the birth pangs of the new DMV.

The fact is that Mr. Sanford’s role in reducing the lines was marginal at best. If any governor deserves credit (and I’m not sure any does), it would be David Beasley or Jim Hodges.

The DMV was the agency everyone loved to hate. The waits were too long, the employees too surly, and too often, a long wait and an unpleasant encounter led to ... no resolution.

So in 1997, the state launched a computer overhaul dubbed Operation Phoenix, which would preplace a rickety mainframe system with 21st century technology. Then in 2001, the Republican leadership in the Legislature made DMV a priority, with two reviews that recommended most of the operational changes that have improved the agency.

By the summer of 2002, officials were ready to switch over to the new computer system, a massive undertaking that required all DMV offices to shut down for several days and normal records processing to cease. In the weeks leading up to that, top DMV officials made the rounds of editorial boards to spread the word that things were about to get a lot worse — after which they would get better.

The officials — including Marcia Adams, whom Mr. Sanford would name as director of the new Department of Motor Vehicles — didn’t fully grasp how bad things were going to get: The offices reopened to five-hour waits and computer crashes, and then counties started finding errors in the new records that would take the better part of a year to sort out

But the “better” part was already in the works: The new system would slash the time it takes to print a driver’s license from 20 minutes to one; a relational database would let clerks process transactions faster, and they would be able to provide records on the spot, rather than ordering them up from the central office.

Once the new system was running, officials would start rolling out programs to let drivers conduct much of their business by Internet or phone. They had even begun work on some operational changes recommended by the legislative reviews, such as centralizing the more time-consuming services that tended to slow things down in field offices.

By the time Mr. Sanford was elected that fall, the average wait time had dropped back down to 20 minutes. But the sorting-out was still going on, so one of the governor-elect’s first moves was to name his own DMV task force. It came up with a few helpful recommendations, but mostly proposals that were already being considered or implemented.

When I asked Mr. Sanford last week about the claims, he acknowledged that the lines would have gotten shorter even without his input. But he argued that “subsequent change would not have been maybe as consistent, as forceful, as directed without the change in structure” that made the DMV accountable to him.

Fair enough. He certainly deserves credit for some of the more recent cost-cutting moves, and for keeping things from slowing back down.

But that’s a lot different from claiming credit for cutting our wait times from half a day to less than half an hour. That was someone else — no matter what we might think we remember.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.