When I was a kid, I got my first drivers license in North Dakota. The whole process was handled via snail mail between state offices. Took about two weeks.
IN the decades I’ve lived in Minnesota, I’ve gotten or renewed my license eight times, counting last month.
Three of those times, it took six or more weeks to arrive. Another time, after three months, I went to the newly-computerized DPS, and found that some union data entry droog and entered an address that I had not only never lived at, but didn’t exist (“18xx Minnehaha in MInneapolis”).
And this last month? Six weeks and counting. I went to the DPS office. They said “Production issue”.
3-4 years ago, I got my mother’s drivers license renewed in North Dakota. Printed on the spot. Done while I waited, and I didn’t wait long enough to even notice.
So tell me, DFLers – when Minnesota brags about having “good government”, what are you talking about?
Apparently DEI is actually a cover or distraction for a growing lack of competence. Not even excellence, just competence.
Of course, it’s well known that competence is just white privilege, so there is that.
Google “MNLARS”.
When my next door neighbor moved to North Dakota he told me he was shocked at how quickly, and inexpensively, it was to transfer five vehicle registrations to his new residence.
I think the Dayton administration had the controls at the outset. Although Walz bungled Covid so badly who can tell the difference?
I’m a current North Dakota resident. Last renewal: $15 fee, sorted through paperwork for Real ID, got my card, and was still there for less than 20 minutes.
After Hurricane Ian, residents needed ID to file claims for insurance, disaster relief.
Florida sent mobile units to stricken areas, printed new DLs on the spot.
Of course, they have a functional government whereas we are happy to pay for a Better Minnesota.
What’s going on, as far as I can tell, is that somebody at the DMV decided that it would be more cost effective to have one giant printer than to have multiple small printers–ignoring the cost of packaging and mailing the licenses. What they did in doing so is to ignore all the lessons that quality engineers have learned in the past 40 years or so; that we need to move away from the “big steam engine” model to smaller units that can go on or offline as needed for repairs.
The six week waits are a “feature” of this choice, as the big units break down just as often as the little ones. Oopsie.
When I moved to Minnesota 24 years ago, I was shocked at how slow the whole driver’s license process was. I had lived in Iowa all my life before that, and we always had licenses printed on the spot. The fact that Minnesota couldn’t do that and instead gave me some carbon copy paper to carry around in the meantime was really bothersome to me.
Thinking a bit more about this, the kind of printer used for drivers licenses (and fake IDs) is a card printer, available for a few hundred bucks. So as soon as you’re packaging and mailing out a few hundred licenses–a gimme with 243 DMV offices and five million people in the state–you actually spend more doing centralized printing than distributed.