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DMV beefs up online service options

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Tony DiNicola

Online license plate renewals

JANESVILLE — You’ve been working extra hours, shuttling kids and getting ready for the holidays when you find your vehicle license plate renewal—due tomorrow—at the bottom of your monthly bills.

A lunch-break trip to the state Department of Motor Vehicles office isn’t an option.

The solution: Renew your vehicle registration online at wisconsindmv.gov.

Last year, 854,622 Wisconsinites renewed their registrations online, making it the DMV’s most popular online service.

“We average about 75,000 a month,” said Mitch Warren, DMV director of vehicle services.

Seeing that popularity, the DMV later this month will begin offering more of its services online—including requests for driver or vehicle records and checks to see if a personalized license plate is available, Warren said.

The online services are convenient, but they’re also a bit more expensive.

“We have to charge a convenience fee because the credit card processing companies charge a fee to the retailer—which in this case is us—every time one of their cards is used,” Warren said. “Typically, it’s a percent of the transaction amount and adds up to a lot of money given the scale of DMV’s business.”

Expect an extra 25 cents to $1.25 for doing business with the DMV online.

“Private sector merchants typically build the cost of credit card transactions into the cost of products they sell, regardless of the method of payment,” Warren said. “However, fees collected by the DMV in Wisconsin are set by statute and the receipts from those fees must be deposited in specified funds. We cannot increase prices to cover fees, nor can we withhold money from the receipts to cover the costs.

“We’re taking great efforts to make things available to folks in a modern way,” Warren added, “and that doesn’t always have to include coming to one of our service centers or spending time on the phone.”

People serving themselves online makes the DMV operate more efficiently.

“Due to things like our online applications we’ve continued to meet ever-increasing mandates and become a smaller organization,” Warren said.

Online applications aren’t the sole reason for the upgrades, but they play a big part in division efficiency, he said.

“When we look at staff positions, we calculate it in hours worked by DMV staff. In 2000, we worked about 1.6 million hours. Last year, we worked 1.2 million hours, so DMV’s hours worked has declined 25 percent in the last 10 years,’’ Warren said.

Department efficiency also is calculated in the number of products per hour an employee produces, Warren said.

“In 2000, we did 7.3 products per hour. Last year we did 9.5 products per hour,” he said. “We have many less hours worked and are getting more bang for our buck from the hours that are worked.”

This, however, can’t all be attributed to online services, he said.

“We’ve made other improvements in efficiency,” Warren said, “but online is an important piece.’’