By Paige Winfield Cunningham
Imagine if state employees worked four 10-hour days each week. Or if you could renew your driver’s license and pay a parking ticket at the state Department of Motor Vehicles at the same time. Or if it was easy to read the state budget.
These are some ideas to be considered when Gov. Bob McDonnell’s government reform commission meets in two weeks. While McDonnell has been heavily promoting his hopes to sell off the state’s liquor stores, he says he has also read hundreds of pages suggesting ways to improve government.
Everyone is talking about the liquor stores but there are lots of other ideas in the mix, the governor said after a town hall meeting last week at Mary Washington University—where he spent the first 15 minutes pitching ABC privatization to the audience.
“ABC privatization is what I know you all are focusing on, but there are hundreds of ideas that are out there,” McDonnell told reporters. “I have read 222 pages of ideas that I think represent 1,000 specific suggestions we’ve had from staff, cabinet members, the website and others.”
One idea is turning the DMV into a “one stop shop” where drivers can do things like pay overdue traffic tickets or child support payments at the same time they renew their driver’s license. DMV Commissioner Rick Holcomb says he has many ideas for ways Virginia’s 74 centers can partner with local governments to offer more services.
Holcomb offers some examples. Right now, if a driver’s license has been suspended because of overdue tickets or payments, they can’t pay the bill right there at the DMV, he says. If the DMV could accept payment for things like traffic tickets, property taxes or childcare payments, drivers’ visits to government agencies could possibly be reduced from three times to just once.
Considering that about 25,000 people visit DMV offices each day, reducing visits is a goal, Holcomb says. He envisions the DMV as a “portal” into Virginia government.
“When citizens go into a state office, they’d like to have a whole menu of things they could do,” Holcomb said.
Holcomb wants that menu to include obtaining hunting and fishing licenses, which right now can be issued by Wal-mart, but not by the DMV. He also says he’s been talking with Virginia lottery officials about allowing DMV offices to sell tickets, and plans on trying it out soon in a few locations.
“We’re probably going to start piloting it,” Holcomb said. “I’m cautiously optimistic that by the end of the year we could have lotteries in a number of our offices.”
After a summer of gathering ideas, commission members will start considering them in September.
Four committees dealing each with a different aspect of government reform met over the last few months, while McDonnell appeared at several of eight town hall meetings for the public to weigh in. On Sept. 8, McDonnell will make his pitch for privatizing the ABC stores. And five days later the whole commission is planned to meet.
House Speaker Bill Howell, vice-chairman of the commission, says that after the dust clears from the ABC proposal, he expects to hear a lot of ideas much smaller in scope—similar to those pitched by Holcomb. The strength of the commission will lie in its continuing throughout McDonnell’s term, he said.
“I think there will be a lot of suggestions and a lot of them initially aren’t going to be big money-savers but steps in the right direction,” Howell said.
