A recent decision by Pike County supervisors illustrates how Mississippi government’s efforts to operate efficiently sometimes unfairly passes on costs to local governments.
Pike County supervisors learned a while back that the Mississippi Department of Public Safety planned to close its driver’s license office in Summit. If that occurred, the closest place for residents of the 38,000-population county to get their license in person would in Brookhaven, a distance of 15 to 40 miles.
So the county made a deal. Supervisors will pay the rent for the building used for driver’s license services — $1,600 a month, or $19,200 a year — through September 2023. The Pike County office, located in Summit, is the only one in the state that requires an advance appointment for service.
It may be that the Department of Public Safety hopes that perpetually tight budgets will convince Pike County not to continue with the expense of the rental next year. Or, when the one-year agreement ends, the DPS may just tell the county its driver’s license office is closing.
The larger point, though, is that counties shouldn’t have to pay extra for services that the state is supposed to provide. The Pike County board deserves credit for its willingness to spend the money for the convenience of its residents. But licenses are a state requirement, so the state ought to pay the rent for the building.
A look at the Driver Service Bureau page on the Department of Public Safety website shows that Pike County is far from the only location where driver’s license offices are at risk.
The page lists 47 different driver’s license offices in the state. That by itself indicates that people in a lot of counties, surely more than 30, have to drive a little ways to renew their license in person.
Of the 47 locations, the one in Indianola, which was open five days a week, is listed as permanently closed. Another 13 of them, all of which were in small towns, and open only one to three days per month, are “closed until further notice.” So that leaves 33 locations to issue new driver’s licenses or renew existing ones.
The offices are grouped in the same districts as the Mississippi Highway Patrol, and if the website closings are permanent, only two of the state’s nine districts, both in north Mississippi, will have five driver’s license offices. All other districts will have between two and four.
The obvious goal, and it’s a good one, is to get more and more drivers to renew their licenses online. In theory, this allows drivers to avoid the hassle of waiting in line at an office, and it reduces the number of workers needed to provide the service.
But several concerns come to mind immediately. First, of course, is that there’s a certain percentage of Mississippians who are unfamiliar with the internet and therefore would never use it to renew their driver’s license.
The other concerns come from the driver’s license website. People who get their mail at a post office box instead of at their home are not eligible for online renewal. You have to pay for online renewal with a credit card, which some people do not use. If your license expired more than a year ago, you have to renew at an office. And you can only renew online every other time, which means anybody who does it that way will have to appear in person the next time.
All those exceptions indicate that online renewals have the potential to reduce the number of people making in-person visits to the driver’s license office by less than 50%, mainly because everyone still has to come in for every other renewal. While the internet certainly has encouraged a significantly lighter workload at these offices, the state seems equally determined to reduce the number of offices, relenting only when a local government offers financial aid.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
