Finance & Services Committee - Regular Meeting

It's time for this biweekly meeting of the Finance and Business Committee of Denver City Council. Join us for the Finance and Business Committee starting now.

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Finance and Business Committee. Today is Tuesday, June 9th. My name is Serana Gonzalez-Gutierrez. I'm one of your council members at large and glad to be the chair of this committee. We're going to start with council member, not announcements, what am I saying? Council member introductions and then we will go on to our agenda for today. I'm going to start with any members we have participating virtually. and see if anybody's online, not yet. All right, then we'll go ahead and start in the room and I will start over here to my left. Chantel Lewis, District 8.

Good morning, Darrell Watson, Fine, District 9. Good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver, District 6.

Good morning, Diana Romero-Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Good morning, Chris Hines, Denver's Perfect, 10. All right.

And we may have council members joining us online. I'll make sure that we welcome them as they join. With that said, today we have a briefing coming from the Department of Motor Vehicle. Thank you so much for the folks joining us today. Please introduce yourselves, proceed with your presentation. I'll be taking a cue from council members and we'll do questions at the end.

Wonderful. Good morning, everyone. Good morning, council members. We're glad to be here today. My name is Sophia Hassman. I am the City and County of Denver Treasurer, and I am joined by our Director of Motor Vehicle, Ted Trujillo. We really appreciate this invitation to be here and present to you some updates on the DMV and status of things going on in 2026. I'd also like to acknowledge the hardworking staff of the DMV. They have, you know, continued to serve our constituents day in, day out. and really have been working hard in a high volume and high demand environment and continue to show up with professionalism and engagement and are innovative in ways that we can continue to serve Denver's residents as well as the commercial customers we have. So today we want to share some information about the DMV operations, our work plans, and some opportunities coming forward, goals, and we're really happy to come here and get feedback from the committee for working together on, you know, those goals that we can help serve this entire Denver residents and all the Denverites. and the community of the commercial businesses that interact with all of the business vehicles. So we also want to make sure that we provide a clear understanding of when and how the prep is to come to the DMV versus other opportunities in which a lot of the transactions are made. There is a high volume of transactions from different components of online, mail, kiosks, and then in person transactions as well. So I will let Ted start with the slides that we have. Let me move forward.

First of all, DMV is, in statute, we are identified as agents of the state. The state of Colorado, by statute, is the only one who can title and register and create credentials for residents of the state of Colorado. We are agents of the state, therefore they delegate that authority to us as a county to then facilitate those services. Colorado also uses the title and registration process to collect many of their taxes. One of the most common complaints you hear from residents that come from other states to Colorado is the sticker shock initially because they may have paid $50 for an annual renewal where we may be in the thousands of dollars based on the taxing sources. Basically, that's what we do. We title and register motor vehicles for residents of the city and county of Denver. We do not do driver's license services as that's a state function. So for the county and state services for us, as I said, we do primarily title and registration services. The state then they do primarily IDs, driver's license. They do a lot of the CDL drivers and they also do education, certification, all of those kinds of things for the CDL side of the shop. And they also are responsible for overseeing your driving record and then any administrative sanctions that may go along with that. So the state takes care of all of that and the city and county of Denver then titles and registers vehicles so that all residents can own and drive and have and pay their taxes legally each year. We just recently went through a state audit. We go through an annual audit where they oversee our inventory. They are responsible for providing inventory and inventory is everything from license plates, the tags that go on your car, the backer boards, title paper, all of those things are what we then, the state sends those to us and then we are accountable for every piece of that inventory. We treat inventories the same as cash. If those inventory gets into the wrong hands, you can see that people can avoid having to pay taxes. They can put tags on their cars that they're not actually have paid their taxes to have. Title paper can cause a national problem. where if somebody were to get a vacant title paper, they can go in and put information. Someone can come and say that they can get all the information off your vehicle and then come and say that they're the owner of your vehicle if they were to get title paper. Or they can get a vehicle that was deemed in Colorado as not roadworthy, take it to another state and have a clean title, and they could go and try to get it, title and registered in another state with a clean title. And so we really treat our inventory as cash and take it very seriously. because it has lots of legal ramifications if we don't. We did have our audit this year and we were very proud to be able to announce that we had a perfect audit on the state scoring system. And some of the comments that they mentioned were, as they observed and went through in all of our branch offices, they really talked about the professionalism of our staff and how well they were interacting with basically the Denver community and how seriously they take keeping track of their inventory and how they interact with customers. The next slide, as part of our ongoing strategy to continue to utilize other ways of serving customers in the metro area, not just walk-in customers, is this map that you're seeing here is basically a distribution of kiosks around the city and county of Denver. and they are located, most people are within 10 miles at any point in time within a kiosk in the metro area. We also have two kiosks in two of our branch offices, the Northeast branch on I-70 in Peoria and the Southwest branch on Hampton and Sheridan. And those two branches have cash, they will take cash, not only credit cards. There's only three cash, machines in the state of Colorado and we have two of them. This was done as a recognition that we, many of our population in City and County of Denver, live on a cash basis and so they, in order to utilize the services of the kiosk, we wanted to present to them the opportunity to come in and pay with cash. So we do have these kiosks. The other thing about I think that is a real benefit to residents of City and County of Denver is they can use any kiosk anywhere in the state. So maybe you're out of town visit family or maybe you're up in the mountains enjoying the weekend and you realize your tags are going to expire that day. You can go try and find a kiosk in that local community and renew your tags right there no matter where you're at. And we do track where Denver residents use other kiosks. And we also track whether they use it in English or in Spanish. And so we're trying to get an idea of what the Denver community wants and what are they benefiting from when they actually access the kiosks. and so we will continue to encourage folks to use our kiosks. We'll continue to encourage them to, you know, skip the line if you will, go out, take care of it while maybe they're out getting their groceries or they're running other errands. They can in fact get their tags. Common complaint in the past from folks is The reason they didn't want to mail in their renewal transactions is they're like, no, I want to have my tags in hand when I pay for them. While at the kiosk, you in fact can have that happen. So changing behavior takes time. And we're in about our third year year now of using the kiosks and every month we see the increased usage of kiosks across the metro area. And so we want to hope that residents will continue to utilize that, save them some time and make sure that they have their tags in hand when they move on. This next slide will basically give you some idea of our volume that we serve. So we serve on average about 65,000 customers a year, on average about 3,100 people a year a day. And as you can see, the breakout in the branches, we almost served about 286,000 people last year. We also served almost 290,000 people in e-services, and that includes, and then you can see that the kiosks is really growing. We also have something called a third party. A couple of years ago, the state legislature created a process where primarily the dealer industry, motor vehicle dealerships, can work with third-party transactors and they can do their title work. They can then file all their title work on their behalf. What we have seen over the years, over the next last years, we're seeing an increase in some of the dealerships hiring vendors to do their title work. That way they don't have to hire staff to process all their paperwork. They use these third party transactions. And we believe that as the industry continues to recognize that there's money to be made doing this, because they charge, of course, the dealerships a fee to process the paperwork. So as we see more and more people get into the game, they will, in fact, will start seeing more and more third party transactions. Initially, they thought this was going to be a relief of paperwork and process for the DMV. It is not. We have to then audit all of that paperwork and because they're not trained by the state or by the counties and they make many, many errors and we have to go in and correct them. As you see that increase, it doesn't mean it's taking work off our plate, it's actually adding work to our plate because we have to ensure that their paperwork is accurate and accountable. They're not accountable to accuracy, we are as the county, so we have to follow that paperwork. And then finally, you can see that the kiosk continues to grow and we will continue to do that. Next is our wait times. We have seen an increase in wait times over the last three years and we are very well aware of that and we have done everything that we can. We had strategically, we looked at our data a couple of years ago and we recognized that we had about 30% of our daily walk-in customers did not need to be there. And so that's why we started making some changes in our processes, we made some changes. in what transactions we'll do in office versus having them go online or do it in a kiosk or mail or in our Dropbox. We have offered all of those other service options so that residents do not have to come into the offices. We have seen an increase in wait times. There have been various reasons why this has happened and we have been working diligently with the resources we have available to us. to continue to provide the services. We are still seeing in our branch offices on a daily basis, we're seeing still about 1200 walk-in customers per day. So we are continuing to do that and try to decrease our wait times as much as we possibly can. but also know that most of the transactions that come in now, we were always able to balance our wait times with having those quick, fast transactions, the ones that took two and three minutes real quickly, you can get them in and out. Now, most of the people that do come into our branch offices, Colorado is a destination state. You have people who are always moving into the state, and especially into the metro area. So those title transfers take more time. We also have a lot of industry around us, and so that title work takes an extended amount of time. So with all of that, we have seen increases in wait times within our branch offices. For our internal challenges, Now I'm gonna turn this over to Sophia, sorry.

Thank you. So we have several internal challenges we're trying to address and look forward to resolve. One of them is we have a higher turnover rate in DMV than the rest of the city. And we also have a high number of leave cases and long training times. So our current effective staffing rate is only about 55%. So with that, we have hired a class of trainees in May, and they will go through a training period, but until they're fully trained through the state processes, then they can go into the branches. We will start to see more people available to serve customers. But coming with that, it comes with several months to potentially six months of on-site in-customer training that they are also being They go through that process and they really are guided through the managers and the leads of each branch to be fully trained and up and running. And we're hoping with some of these internal challenges we'll address in a little bit our work plan for 2026. We also have always changing things with the legislation and the Colorado state system that we use. Currently we use the state computers, the state credit card machines, and the state software system to run all the transactions through. So as those things change, we also have to roll out the training to the staff, which requires ongoing training. And I'd like to just commend our training team to keeping up to those challenges. And they meet regularly every month to address you know, how we can do things better and changes that are going in the system. That system itself had a huge upgrade in February of 2024 or 2026 this year. And it actually required to be offline for the statewide for a few days for both the driver's license services and for the vehicle services. And the staff has been doing a great job learning all of those changes and really rolling out the details and also providing feedback to the state and other counties about what's working and what's not working. Our rolling closures are challenging for our customers and our staff. So if you're not familiar, we've had rolling closures going on for a few years now. That means one of the four quadrant locations has been closed each week, and then another quadrant will close the following week. And that's been challenging to keep up with multiple levels of communication to the public and also assigning staff assignments because they're constantly moving their work location. And then managing our wait times is of top concern as well. But our challenge is to continually maintain that excellent customer service even in a high volume environment and high demands. So I would like to get into the work plan and our opportunities we have coming up. And we are also looking forward to feedback from you all on how we can continue to make improvements. So our goal is to improve service and support our staff. Some things we'd like to address and talk about are ensuring that the public is very well communicated, that we have all the tools and signage and website information that we can provide them so they know what service options are available to them. We would like to eliminate the rolling closures and we would like to position Tremont as the commercial center And we'll evaluate technology solutions. So I'm going to go into each one of these areas in more detail But really we're working presently on reframing the DMV web pages to make sure that Someone knows when they need to come in a branch and what they need to have with them versus the kiosk mail or Dropbox or online options that they have We'd also like to improve branch signage for customers to make sure that if they come to a branch and are waiting in line, they're there for the right purpose. Sometimes we even get customers who are coming for driver's licenses and we have to turn them away. So it's a good goal for us to communicate well to the people in the line even before they get to the door. And presently we have a door desk at every branch and that door desk kind of previews the customer's transaction and will put them into the queue in the appropriate transaction that they are needed so that the staff who are trained to do that can help them. And there's different types of transactions that are handled and some staff, you know, that may be new from training may not be as well versed on out-of-state transfer titles. So in that regard, we're wanting to make sure to balance the needs of the customer and get them through the line and also, you know, make sure that someone who's attending to them knows exactly what they need. Our goal is that they don't have to come back to us more than once and if we can get that kind of preview at the door when we give them a ticket then it really helps us reduce confusion or say hey you didn't have your proof of insurance and they've additionally waited more time that they needed. So our goal is really that communication component. And a big portion of that and part of our strategic approach is to make sure to continue to guide that volume of transactions that can be completed one of the four ways that's outside of the branch. And last year we had about 63% of our overall transactions that Ted previously showed were in fact not in a branch. and then 37% were still branch transactions, and this year that's already increased to 68%. This slide just has a number of services that are available on the MyDMV Colorado site. So this is the customer facing component of the Colorado software that a customer can do many of these items including renewing their vehicles, registering for a first time, they have to create an account. But each one of these services only takes a few minutes online to really And the state also has a lot of resources on how to create an account and how to go through each component. So we're seeing more volume being completed through this mechanism. And with the in-branch services, this is a list of the in-branch services that require a visit from a customer. So renewals that are more than 13 months expired, title transfers, commercial and fleet services, inoperable vehicles, bonds, special mobile machinery, which is a license of specific construction equipment. And then drives record issues, drives is the state software system. So if someone is experiencing issues on their online portal, we will take them in branch and help them resolve that. And similar to the kiosk payment processing issues. So our goal in looking at eliminating rolling closures is to regularly operate what we'll call the four quadrants of the city. So northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest. And we're hoping that elimination of the rolling closures will create consistency for the customers. They know which branches are open and which serve them, and then also create consistency you know, through Google. Google, it's difficult to keep up with what's closed, what's open. But if someone's just saying, where's my nearest DMV branch, that it will say the hours and it'll be open regularly. In addition, this, we believe, will create a lot of relief to our staff. So the staffing assignments in the last two years have been unpredictable about where they're going to be in the next week. And we've been working on ways to create more stability with that, but are constantly kind of balancing people who are out on leave or vacation and making sure we have enough people to serve the customers. So with a consistent workplaces for them to be to serve the residential customers, I think we can create a lot of consistency both on the staff and the employee side. What this plan would look like is having the four quadrants in the city servicing all of the residential transactions and we're proposing that Tremont would be the commercial center. So dealing with fleets, motor vehicle dealers, any other type of business vehicle transactions and With that, the way we can do the rolling closure, we really have to, Excuse me. We are looking at that in the bigger picture of everything and seeing how that will work with our staff and we also will need a big communication to the commercial customers. Those transactions generally take longer. They'll bring in five or six transactions at a time to process and if they were in a regular queue with other residents, then they're going to be taking up that time and there's going to be increased wait times with the commercial customers and the regular branches. So our goal is to try to centralize those types of transactions that we know take longer and staff for that and then also have the staff in the other four quadrants serving the rest of the community. How we would do that is basically re-evaluating our Tremont DMV. So currently it operates three different departments. So there is the public transaction branch. There is the team that processes all the mail transactions. And then there's a team who deals with motor vehicles and fleet customers. And they also take a lot of phone calls. They have about 2,800 calls a month that are handled between the business community and the residents. So they have a lot of volume. However, that location has limited parking and limited internal space for the customers. So in a lot of ways, you'll see this picture on the screen of the lines that can exist. And this is not uncommon to see at other branches, but it just can be more compounded in some ways with the commercial customers who come and have many transactions to process. So our goal to staff that fourth location instead of having a rolling closure would be take the public branch employees from Tremont and put them in another location so that we would be able to have all four locations open at the same time. We are also constantly evaluating new technology solutions. So looking forward towards potential for appointments, pay by phone options. We are constantly communicating with our peer counties on their successes and what they're doing. In addition, the state system is continually evolving about what can be processed online. and they're also in communication with the counties about new advancements that are coming down the road and what they're looking for with legislative support. We would likely aim to pilot some of those solutions with our commercial customers first so that we can see where those successes lie and how we can move through a high volume of transactions and then roll out other additional innovations to our residents. So our goal implementation outcomes are really the consistent reliable locations and assignments will improve morale and turnover. It will also create customer trust knowing what branches they can be served by and you know having that service in all four quadrants of the city instead of a rotating basis. And then, you know, looking forward towards technology advancements to serve the customers. So that includes our current work on our DMV motor vehicle page in Denver. And then the state is always making changes to theirs. So we do keep up with that and we're trying to ensure the customers also know what is going on with our technology and our public communication. So some of our process improvement plan includes presently finalizing our website upgrades. And that will include any changes that come forward after this meeting and process improvements that we're going to roll out. And hiring and training the new staff. We're really excited to get those staff that were just hired in May out to the branches. Our drive system is expected to be stabilized now. The state had different service tickets as it was rolled out to the counties over the last few months, which we had people working on and providing input in. Denver's very high volume, so we had a lot of input into what that drive system looks like and things that were working well and that weren't, and we're glad to be part of that so that it is a successful system. And our goals in the coming months is to position the Tremont Center for commercial customers and eliminate those rolling closures so that we can serve the max quadrants of the city. And then we're excited to have all of our trainees out in the branch locations. With more trainees on site, we will be able to fill more counters and process more transactions for the residents. So the long-term goal for us is really to make sure customers can complete services in the appropriate fashion. So whether it's one of the four non-branch options or in a branch, they know that they're supposed to be there, they have what they need, and that we're consistently open and able to serve them. and really create stability for the staff. As much stability as we can create, the more transactions we can process, the more customers we can serve. I do have a few additional resources that I'd like to point out. We have been constantly working with the Sunny chat bot, and these are some examples of information it's providing back, which is the more information we feed it, the better the response will be, and helping our DMV answers get run through that. So it includes the driver's license options and giving them the state information, as well as other options for them for emissions, for example, or the rolling closures presently. We have that as well. The state services, they have a lot of resources and YouTube videos on how to navigate that online portal. And then our own website, which we're excited to make upgrades to and make sure that we're getting those hits and we know where customers are looking for information and answering those questions at the top. So we are excited to have this discussion with you and would like to open it to any questions you have.

Great. Thank you so much for this very robust presentation. Hopefully a lot of questions were answered, but we will go with our queue starting with Councilman Cashman, followed by Pro Tem Mayor Campbell and then Councilman Hines.

Thank you very much. Thanks for the presentation. Why are we at 55% on effective staffing? What do we need to do to change that? I mean, I understand the kiosks, et cetera. I'd rather we were fully staffed than using kiosks.

Well, there have been several things that have happened over the last few years. So, but the primary factor of why we're at 55% of staff every day is part of it are city benefits. You have employees who earn PTO and so, you know, when they schedule it and they have to, they're appropriately taking their PTO, so they're out. We have a policy where we only can have one person per branch out on any given day because If you think about, we have seven work units in five branches and no work unit is larger than seven. And that includes a manager, a lead, and five, if sometimes four and five frontline workers in every branch. And so you have folks who then take their time off. So if you're looking at a branch with seven people, somebody is off that day, now you're down to six.

So we need more people.

It's a throughput problem, right? It's like, it's just basic math. I mean, you have how many people, it's seven to eight minutes per transaction. You calculate by how many people and that's how many of you can get through the door every day. So in that math equation, the more people you have, the more people you need. Sure.

So the fact that we don't have more people, is that simply a matter of your budget?

Well, I would say the 55% also includes the amount of employees on training are computed outside of the fully available employees because they either can't do the full transactions or they're not even in the branches yet. We're hopeful that that 55% increases once we get those trainees into the branches. Also, we have, in addition to the PTO, we have a larger number of leave cases in the DMV. And so part of that is, I believe we have, you know, we're trying to... not have vacancies so that we can fill those positions and make sure we have enough people on the counter. But with the high turnover rate, it creates a little bit of lag time sometimes.

Why is it high turnover?

Well, one, it's a very difficult job. Two, I try to do an exit interview with almost everyone who resigns their position with us. And we have seen an increase of people leaving because they don't like the fact that we move them daily. Every morning at 6 30 I get on to a team's meeting with our branch managers and we evaluate who's coming into work that day. They have checked their call in line. We now look at how many people are going to show up and then we have to make moves almost every single day for staff. So staff will drive to what they believe is their home office. When they get there, They're usually on a rotating schedule. They'll know their next going to have to move. They'll drive to their home office. When they get there, they'll be asked to then go to another office.

And that should be eliminated? because you're stopping the rolling closures, am I correct?

Well, it helps because what it does is if we close the Tremont office, the branch office, the walk-in office, we will take those staff and put one more staff in every branch. So then it will help us to be able to meet the needs of the walk-in population with having that additional staff person if somebody is off, you know, those types of things. So it will help. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Council Member Tamara Campbell. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you. I know we've been having a lot of conversation. I recently did a title change. 110 minutes would have been a welcome wait from start to finish. I had to spend about four hours doing DMV. So there's a few questions that I think I want to just build on with what Councilman Cashman had asked. Is it that we need more bodies, right? So without the rolling closures, more bodies, more people working for the DMV. Is that the ultimate solution that you're talking about?

What I can tell you is back in 2019, 2018, our wait times were down to about 20 minutes or less. our error rates were down to less than 3% and we had more staff at that time. So I think there is a direct correlation between having a higher number of trained staff and how quickly you can do your throughput. And once again, our turnover rate wasn't as high at that time. So you get more seasoned staff, they get much better at doing their job. And staff, they would have a home office that they worked in primarily. They built a team in their office. They felt comfortable. They knew how to work with each other, all of those kinds of things. So yes, I do think that our history has shown that when we had more people, we had better outcomes.

One of the items that we went through a budget workshop with and was to restore basic services to city and the DMV was mentioned in our letter that we sent to the mayor to be able to increase the capacity for the DMV. So I think that you know, myself and other council members are fully aware that we need to decrease those wait times. I will say from the slides that you showed, I did wait a long time, but the folks when I was at the counter, they were great and they were fast. And so I just appreciate the With the amount of people that were there and the wait time that we had, I mean, we were talking dozens and dozens of people in line. We're waiting, we're outside where it's hot, you know, all of the things. And when we got up to the counter, still they were pleasant and they were efficient and very knowledgeable. So just thank you for that. I think you have a great team working for you. I think you just need more of them. The other question that I have is the pilot with the commercial use. When do you think you might pilot the appointment times for just regular general public to be able to do that walk-in?

Currently there's a build-out with our queuing system. It's called Qmatic and that contract is up for renewal this year as well. So there's a portion built out that's for our processing center that's primarily for those dealer transactions. It isn't fully rolled out yet and then future options would require additional work with the vendor, which may be part of those future conversations of what that next contract looks like. So it currently is not available in the current contract that ends, I believe, in October.

But I'd also like to say that It's also when you get down to the basic numbers. So if you have 35 staff who can do those transactions and they can do X number of appointments in a day and hope that everyone shows up for their appointment, you can only do a finite amount of appointments in a nine-hour day. We have done the math and we've kind of figured this out and what we have calculated based on our population in Denver and our daily walk-in for usage, the day we rolled this out, we would have a four-month backlog. So in other words, if you were trying to get an appointment, it would take you four months to get an appointment. So we're really conscious of that variable, so we have to figure out how to combat that first before we roll this out because, for example, some of our sister counties around the metro area, some of them had appointments, they've gone away from them. Some of them are doing hybrid appointments where they have a certain number of appointments they'll do in a month and then they will have a walk-in line for emergencies and then they define what is an emergency. There are some counties who For example, we talked about our mail team. They receive about 450 to 500 pieces of mail every single day that they process. And what some of the sister counties, so now that's a work unit of seven people. What they do is they take appointments four days a week, and then they put everybody on the line to do mortgage mail that one day a week. So we're looking at a whole lot of different ways to be efficient and find ways to get more throughput with the staff that we have.

And then I do have just one other question. It looks like some of the changes would also be knowledge or just information out to community to better understand where to go and what their services are that you can get at a branch and otherwise. Are you doing a specific campaign or are there materials that we can put out in our newsletters? How are we going to let folks know about this change?

I think we definitely want to work with the Department of Finance communications team on this change. I mean, it would be big, and we are excited to roll out something like this and really serve those four quadrants. So we would definitely want to combine and conjoin with your communications to potentially highlight them and provide that information. So we'd be looking forward to working with you all on that.

Yeah. Great. Because I think that, you know, you don't need it until you need it, but then you want it to work when you need it.

Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. Councilman Hines, followed by Councilman Watson.

Thank You committee chair I think where where I grew up in the state of Texas you went to one place for all the things as opposed to the city does some stuff and the state does some stuff and so I'm sure there's a bit of confusion I think you mentioned 30% of people who come to the DMV actually don't need to be there. So that's a lot of churn. And I'm guessing some of that is because of the separation of authority, but not necessarily the communication of what is serviced where. Is that 30%? Is that a fair statement?

The 30% is really how many transactions must be completed in the branch currently versus the 70% that can be done through the other four options.

Okay, so I'm glad you corrected because I think I misunderstood.

But I do think there is a huge miscommunication from folks, especially when we have folks come from other states like Texas, where you go to one place and you can take care of everything. So we see a lot of people coming who are out of state and they just aren't familiar with this Colorado process. That's part of it.

But we also, this goes back to the appointment.

So when a person is in another county and they're waiting six weeks for an appointment, they say they'll come to our office and say, well, maybe they'll just not recognize that I'm not a Denver resident and they'll let me go through. And so a lot of it is turning away other counties to go back to their county. So we see a significant number of people trying to come to Denver when they can't get into their home county.

Wow, and I think the last time I had to visit the Denver DMV, I went to 2855 Tremont, and the gentleman who, I think he's technically a security guard, licensed security guard, he's fabulous. able to proactively communicate with folks. The line was out the door, but proactively communicate with people and explain what they could and could not do. And so some of those, you know, the people who were maybe from other counties or really that, you know, their best shot was not. at the tremont dmv i think you did a really good job of um saving people from waiting i think i was there three hours um but you know what council member romero campbell four hours um that would be really that would make me really sad if i waited four hours and turns out that I was in the wrong spot. Did you have a?

I was just gonna say, and we do have a really good partnership right now with our security team. And it's not part of their orders, but they see that it's valuable because they get less angry customers that they have to deal with later. So we try to train them up with the basics and they walk the line for us all day and they really are a valuable collaborator with us in our branches.

Yeah, thank you. You mentioned the registration fees. You mentioned something about statute. How are vehicle registration fees set? You make the call. Is it the state legislature? How does that work?

It's all set through the state legislature. And every year, DMV will run up to 80 bills every single year. Many of those are plates, different type plates that they want to put on. But there are also many different... because Colorado does use the title and registration process to collect many fees and taxes. And so legislators, because it doesn't count against TABOR and doesn't all of those different reasons, they're always trying to find ways to come in and attach the money they're trying to raise onto the registration process. So it's all done through the legislative process. the city does give our input into whether we think the bill is good, whether we could support it or we're just watching it, all those kind of things, but primarily through the state legislature.

And the DMV at the state is run through the Department of Revenue, is that correct? Correct. So has there been, I know I'm asking you to, well, I guess you have to implement it anyway, but has there been a significant change in the registration fees in the last couple, few years?

Well, there have been a couple of things like electric vehicles. There's been a lot of fee increases around electric vehicles and a couple of years in statute, they've misidentified them. And so what happened last year is we had in Denver, we had, I think, 1,800 vehicles who had been misclassified and they were undertaxed. And so we had the privilege of contacting those 1,800 drivers and say, oh, by the way, this year is going to be really expensive because you have to pay two years of fees. And so that has happened. They've also tacked on the wildlife permit so you can go into state parks. That's been an increase. Every time you get a specialty plate, there's usually an additional fee that goes on. So all of those take place in the fees. We have seen increases every single year. Also, as Sophia mentioned, the drive system, the statewide motor vehicle system has gone through a new upgrade. And so when it was built eight years ago, this was the first time they brought it up, did a new upgrade to it. Well, what it did is it found out that a lot of those taxes were being miscalculated. So there's a lot of vehicles that are coming in and based on their situation by statute, they were not being calculated correctly. So sometimes we're hitting those. We're working with a lot of drivers to identify when, if it was the state's fault, our fault, whatever, and we try to negotiate that and work it out and try to get the state to allow us to not charge the full amount. But there's lots of things that go into those fee increases and we're really just trying to make sure we're following statute and applying them appropriately.

Thank you. I don't envy you or the workers, and maybe this is part of the reason why there's high turnover, when you come from another state and the vehicle registration is $50 and it's $1,000 here, or you get a new car, which happens to be an electric vehicle, and it's $1,000. I'm just picking a nice round number that's actually... a real number, not $1,000 for a vehicle registration. I'm imagining that there are some vehicles that are quite a bit higher than that.

And on top of that, when you come from another state and they don't trust government and they don't trust our taxing system, all of those types of things, they want a... breakdown of every single tax and they want us to show them the statute. They want to show us how it calculates and they want us to show us how it ends up the dollar amount that's on their on the registration fee. So our staff also have to break all that down and unfortunately drives won't break it down. So our staff you know not everybody loves math but they have to because it's many of our residents want they want you to show them that it's accurate.

Speaking of math, I was actually doing some math myself, and the last thing I wanted to dive into, your average daily visitors are 3,106. That doesn't account for 20 to 55 being a busier site than another. It doesn't account for it's just an average day. It's not a peak day. But if you... If it takes eight minutes to service a customer, takes another two minutes, let's say, to transition from one customer to the next customer, 10 minutes of servicing a customer and an employee works eight hours a day, that'd be 480 minutes. worker could service 48 people in a day, that means that you'd have to have 65 workers on staff, the frontline workers on staff every day to keep the wheels well oiled. And I can imagine if you're only at 65 or 55% full strength, you're probably not getting to that average of 65 workers in a day. I'm sure you've gotten the financial analysis, the employee analysis. I've done a lot of analysis in previous roles, so I figured I would do the math. Anytime you're one short of that, then you start getting backups. If you're at only half strength or 55% strength, I can imagine. Now I see why I waited three hours that one time I went to 2855 Tremont.

I mean, if you were to spend, you know, a full day and just watch the staff behind the counter, there is no one who's not working. I mean, we are, they're always what we call a next mode. In other words, customer walks away, they must press next on their... panel to bring the call the next customer and our managers and leads are constantly watching to make sure and then we have metrics around kind of the gap between when the customer left your desk and you call the next customer so we're always sitting on top of that i mean it is just uh you know that conveyor belt just doesn't stop and is and and we're constantly trying to keep up with that but the backlog does happen because of what you just said

Thank you for what you do to help our city continue to move forward.

Thank you. Thank you. Councilman Watson.

Thank you so much, Committee Chair. First, Treasurer Hassman and Director Trejo, thank you so much for the work that you do and all the staff members. I'm blessed to work out of 2855 Tremont Sill. I get to see your employees on a daily or at least every three days. a week when I'm in and out of the office. Councilmember Hines was trying to elevate one of the security team members that work at 28th Piedmont, and his name is Troy. He's with Securitas. All of our Securitas folks are exceptional. Troy is above and beyond and has been, he not only, which I'm certain is not part of his job, supports the folks coming to the DMV. Troy helps to direct folks coming to my office, because those long lines, there's confusion if folks are coming to see me, if they have to stand in the lines. And he monitors the lines as well, walks through the lines, and as my staff comes down, he helps with getting folks who are coming to see the City and County of Denver. well beyond his job, so just putting his name out there. I don't know his last name, but Troy, remember his name. I just think he is fantastic. Two questions on proximity. For the 2855 Tremont office, I know on the east side, a lot of folks within the community from Whittier to Cole to wherever they walk, they bike, not everyone's driving. What's the proximity for the change if we move into the quadrants as far as the time from homes on the east side to any other, the other site that they would be now going to for their regular walk-ins? As far as minutes, so much even miles, if you could calculate that. If you have both, that would be fantastic.

So the closest location is the Northwest location on 44th and Tennyson. That's about five minutes. It's a little. It's a little. Pardon me. It's a little. That is about five miles away, so approximately 15 minutes if it's traveled by car. And there's also the northeast location, which is down I-70, so pretty easy to get from that area of town to I-70 and out to Peoria. That is about 23 minutes away, and I had it written down here, but I think it's nine miles away. To the other southeast, it's about eight miles, probably 25 minutes through the city traffic. And then to southwest, it's a little bit further. I think it's about 12 miles. And then between each branch, we have an average about 10 miles for the quadrants, 10 miles on average to get from one quadrant to another adjacent. And then we... It's probably about a 25 to 30 minute drive between the different branches.

And for capacity management for the commercial-specific targeted work at Tremont, what's your capacity model? How many folks do we need at Tremont? And are the teams existing at Tremont that are doing that work, are they all the folks you need, or are you going to be bringing in other folks from other sites?

No, we'll keep the teams in place right now that we have. We'll disperse the Tremont walk-in branch to other branches, but the others will stay where they are. And the capacity, it depends on certain times of the year. So when we fleet companies, they're on cycles. For example, when a when a large Avis or Hertz, when they're doing their renewals, they'll bring in 3,000 transactions in a day. So that's going to shut us down a little bit, take us a little bit longer to get through those 3,000 transactions. So it's really about keeping the staff we have and trying to maintain our backlog with those particular groups.

Will the queuing remain or will folks be able to then come in and stay in the lobby or in the walk-in area at Tremont who are coming just for commercial?

They'll be able to stay in the lobby area, but they will be queued in. They'll still get put in because that's how we track everything. That's where everything that we do for our data goes through the queuing system. So they'll get queued in. They can wait in the lobby because they don't have the large numbers of people. They just bring large number of transactions per... Because they're usually runners that are hired by the dealers or the... the companies, the fleet companies.

Okay. One quick applaud. You described your rapid improvement events where you have tried out efficiency steps, where you're moving folks around to fill the backlogs. And I love the innovation in the work that you're doing within the DMV. I know it's a tough job. had the opportunity to sit in at your ungodly hour, 6 o'clock a.m. meetings that we have for staff to talk through the process and to see them there and what you're working through and then the herd of folks coming in. So I just want to applaud you and thank you for the good work that you do and look forward to working in concert with you to make sure this is successful. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, Councilwoman Lewis, you're up. Thank you all so much for the presentation. I just have one question specifically regarding the Montbello location and the configuration. It's a bit confusing for folks in terms of how they access. Sometimes they go to the east side of the parking lot thinking that they can come to access the DMV, but they have to walk back around to the building and the lines are typically pretty long. So I'm just curious if there's been any discussion about potentially changing how that building functions so it's more... functional for someone visiting versus if you might work in the building, you kind of understand how it works.

So we have had talks with our real estate folks and especially when law enforcement moved out of that building, it opened up some space and we talked to them about, you know, could we access that new space and maybe utilize it in a different way. There are a couple of things. One, there was an outside community folks who wanted to use the space and so they were lobbying pretty heavy to utilize the space. The second is, In order to reconfigure that side of the building, it's gonna be extremely busy. Because as you know, we also share that space on the first floor with state driver's license. They lease from the city, they have that side. So we have a lot of moving parts in there. And then the other part of it is that there's just that one entrance into the main DMV building. So to be able to try and find other ways to access that building, we would have to move human services, state office. So there's a lot that has to be done and it would be very, very expensive is what we've been told.

The two buildings, the state and the one building, but two offices, the state and the county, those are intentionally separated because they have such different services?

Well, one, they're state employees and then they're city employees. So you have that part of it. The other part of it is that in statute, you have to have certain permissions to see the driver's license side and our staff don't have those permissions. And so you have to also keep the technical side of it and the data. We follow something called Driver's Privacy Protection Act. And so that clearly defines who can see what in the systems. So that's another reason why we do. And then they're set up differently because, you know, they have their cameras set up. I mean, they're kind of a conveyor belt where you walk in, you give your credentials, and you go down, you take your photograph. We would not have the space to set that all up in one place.

Got it. And then the space that the DPD vacated, would you all need that entire space? Yes. hypothetically, if you were to have the opportunity to access that to make it a bit more functional, would you all need that entire space?

Lisa, hello. Hi, good morning. Lisa Lumley, Director of Real Estate. Councilwoman, thank you for the question. No, they would not need all of it. We have talked about it before. We've kind of put it on hold based on some of the other uses we're evaluating that you're familiar with, one being part of the bond, the Senior Center. So we are trying to look at how we can do it. But Ted's right, and as you know, it is limited in the access down there. And so there is... From a cost perspective, we're trying to think through the best way to navigate through that to make it still a good functional space. But I think going back to what you said, and this has been an issue with DMV for years, is its signage. And we've tried to have additional signage around there so that people do see that you've got to go to the west side of the building. And that's maybe something else that we can work with general services to take another look at.

Yeah. So I'm only familiar with the bond piece of that. And I don't know what else is being contemplated for the bottom floor. But it's not just even the signage, because I think we have control over it. It's what they might put in their GPS that's going to take them to whatever side of the building that it takes them to. And so I don't know how we solve for that with our own signage, but that was what happens when I give people the address to like, here's the DMV, and then they end up on the workforce side of it. I just think that the GPS just drops you off at the building, because you're at the building. We'll take that back, but thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you. And I wanted to tell you thank you personally. You helped me with a customer who had come in on their day off and was potentially not going to be able to be seen, and you did everything you could to make sure that that constituent was able to be seen. So thank you for that.

You're welcome. We've had really good luck working with all of your staff, and we talk through what we can do, and we try to accommodate as best we can.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Well, thank you. I do have a couple of questions as well and again, thank you for the robust presentation. I also, similar to Council Pro Tem Romero-Campbell, any interactions that I've had with the staff, with the security staff at the branches that I've been to are absolutely amazing and I just want to commend them on, you know, how professional they are and even having to deal with difficult conversations with folks who have been maybe to the DMV a few times to try to resolve their issue. I might get to that, but I had one of those experiences myself. I also know other people who have as well. And I think that just speaks to a lot of the things that you all are seeing, whether it's the staffing issue, whether it's the ruling closures, but then also the fact that you have to close, not close, you have to stop at a certain time, right? Because we can't, what I've been told at least from the staff is they can't acquire any overtime, right? So you have to see all the customers by a certain time. And if you know in the queue how many you have and you've calculated how much time it takes for each one, then I had moments at 11.30 where they're like, we can't see you. And so anyway, that results in people having to come back and back and back. And I think results in a lot of grape from folks on that situation. But that said, I want to talk a little bit about the dealership processing piece that the legislature passed to allow them to do the title paperwork. Right. I'm curious. One, is it creating, you said it's not making less work for the employees and is it creating more work for them than what it was before when the dealerships were having to go directly through the DMV?

It's created additional workload and different workload. For example, and a lot of it isn't because of the dealers or the third party transaction, it's a limitation of the drive system. For example, you could have a third party transactor come in and process 150 vehicles in a month. we have to go in and manually try to find those vehicles to break out the fees because it doesn't track them by any identifier. So if you have 150 and we're trying to find the $7.50 that comes to DMV, we have to go in and go through all of those third party transactions every single month. And so it's taking our finance team, one member of their team, at least one to two days a month just to go through and reconcile the third party transactions. Then on the other side, when the dealers do process the paperwork, we're having to audit all that paperwork because the state made the decision that we would not train these dealers because that puts liability on us that we trained them. Therefore, if they make the mistake, we didn't train them well. So we put it back onto the dealer's community to say, you have to demonstrate that you can train your own people. Well, they don't necessarily take it as seriously as we do. It's just paperwork to them. And so we have to go through and audit all that paperwork and try to rectify any problems before you, as the owner of that vehicle, have a serious problem next year when you're trying to renew it or you try to sell that vehicle later. So it does cause... All of that causes unfunded work. We did as the counties and as the County Clerks Association have taken note and took a position that it was an unfunded mandate being passed down by the state and the legislature still passed it.

I'm just curious if there's maybe some kind of remedy because as we know, things can be amended. They can take a look at it again and say, okay, this is creating this backlog or this additional issue that wasn't occurring before. And so I was just curious if you know if the DMV is seeking to try to remedy that issue, if it's causing more hardship on employees and knowing there's a lot... At play here, and so if we were able to mitigate some of those things by, you know, is it a partnership between the dealership and the DMV in making sure that people are properly trained that they are taking it serious? Like, you know, is there some kind of mechanism that can create that? oversight, I guess. I don't know. I'm just throwing things out there and you don't have to answer. I was just like, there has to be a way to address this because it was something that was put in place and we now know what the impacts are. There's always ability to go back and try to remedy it.

So we're trying to do two things in the immediate. So to answer your question about the legislature, you know, everybody is always fighting over how many bills you can do. This one always gets deprioritized because it's like they always have something better. We've already passed that one. We don't want to go back to revisit that. So that one never seems to raise up to the And plus, you know, everybody's pro-business and they want these dealers to be able to turn things over as quickly as they can. So that's, there's always that side of it. So maybe someday it will or maybe we'll get a fee out of it that maybe we can hire additional staff, all those kinds of things. That's what if. What we can do in the immediate future is one, we're updating our website and we have created a tab just for the dealers and they can go in step by step and we're trying to really walk them through how to complete the paperwork. The other thing we're in the process of doing right now and we hope to roll it out twice, at least once this year and then twice a year in 2027 is we will hold two training days for dealers where they can come in and we're gonna walk them from A to Z. How do you complete a packet? What are the things that we're looking for? How can you make this more efficient? How do you access the forms online? All of those how-to things and we're hoping that by being able to do that a couple times a year with our training team that that will in fact improve their work product.

That's great, thank you so much for taking on all of those measures. As a recovering state legislator, I know the push that you have in trying to get legislation through. But also, there are council members, and right now I'm one of them, it may change in the coming years. But we have our legislative committee, and I'm one of the council members right now that is part of that. So we are the ones reviewing all the bills with the mayor's office and And we do have those report outs come to our governance and intergovernmental committee. And so I'm going to take note of that and would love to have a follow-up conversation on that. The next question I had was about the enforcement of expired tags. And so we know that there was that enforcement that was put in place last year. Prior to that, they had decreased or not doing any enforcement on expired tags or expired temporary license plates. Do you think that has contributed at all to the... Has there been an increase because of now that enforcement happening? Do you think that's contributed at all?

Definitely. At first, Denver County was one of the only law enforcement agencies who chose to start enforcing this. And then once I think the surrounding county saw the success of that, they started doing it as well. So it's more acceptable now that they are going to be pulling you over or they're going to cite you for those. But whenever Denver puts out a notice that they're going to be enforcing it, we know we're going to see an increase in the next couple of weeks. And especially, so if you're 12 months or less, you can still go to a kiosk. But if you're in that 13th month, you have to come in to a branch office. So we will see a spike in renewals coming into our offices because of the enforcement.

And so on that note, is it part of protocol that people receive, you know, the little postcard you get that says, hey, your tags are going to be expired soon, or you got a new car, your temporary license plate is going to be expired soon. Is that required to be sent out to customers? Because I will say that there's a few folks that I know that... reached out to us because they never received the postcard. And I don't know if that's a requirement or it's just more of a courtesy. And so then they didn't realize that their license, their tags, not maybe they're temporary because you should know that. You've got a totally different thing on your car. But like your tags, for instance, you didn't realize that they expired. Now you're maybe six months behind. You get a ticket. $400 and it could be you're parked downtown and you get a ticket. Maybe you're pulled over, you get a ticket. So anyway, yeah. Are the postcards, is that like part of protocol or is that more of a courtesy?

It's more of a courtesy, but it's best practice and so we do that. The biggest problem is... There are two problems. One, the postal service and it gets lost. But the biggest problem is that most people believe that when they change their address with the post office, it changes it with the DMV. So it doesn't. And we have an address on record that by statute we must communicate with you at that address. resident. So many times it's because folks didn't change their address and when they come in and they identify that we'll walk them through changing their address. But a big part of it, our biggest challenge is because we get boxes of return permits, I mean renewal notices every single day and most of them are because people didn't change their address in the DMV system.

Well, thank you for that. I think we should do like a big PSA about that because I know that there's been folks that that happened to me and then maybe four times later going back and forth to everything and then trying to go to a kiosk and it was closed down for like an update or something like that. But the kiosks are amazing. I really do like that. I go to the grocery store and I can renew my plates and it's amazing. I really do appreciate that service. One other quick PSA. So Years ago, 2019, I was pulled over for my tags being expired. Unbeknownst to me, my registration was up to date. However, somebody stole my tags, right? And so I got pulled over after I dropped off my kid at school. And the police officer informed me that I didn't anybody ever tell me that I'm supposed to take a razor blade and cut lines into my sticker.

Mm-hmm.

I was like, no, nobody actually did ever, which is interesting because I grew up in the North side. Nobody ever told me that. I've asked many people like, hey, did you know about this? People are like, no, I didn't know that that's a thing. All of that to say, PSA, get a razor blade and strike some scores into it so that your tags don't get stolen. Yeah, so it was a very interesting interaction. But needless to say, maybe if the staff could tell people that, that would be great. If not, I'll just do some PSA videos. The last question that I have is about the registration fees. Are there any specific fees that go to the city and county of Denver in that whole bucket of registration fees that are collected?

Yes, there's a couple. One, there's a $4 fee that is just for the processing fee. For the last 10 years, the counties have been trying to get that increased, and the legislature just has not approved it. There's SOT, and I know what SOT is. I just can't remember the acronym for you right now. But that's the largest amount of it that goes directly to the counties.

How much is that usually, like, percentage-wise?

I don't know the percentage, but I can tell you, like, for example, we collect about, I would say, somewhere around $30 million a month in total fees and taxes and about... 24 million of it goes to the county and the other goes to the state.

Can you say that again? How many?

About 24 million goes to the county out of all the various taxes that we collect on that. So it's a significant amount. The county is collecting a significant amount of taxes and fees off of the renewal process.

This SOT is specific ownership tax. So it's like property tax every year. It's based on evaluation of what your vehicle is valued at. So that is a tax that's every year. And then when you first purchase your vehicle, there is the sales or use tax. And that could be either collected at the dealer or it is collected at the county branch office.

Okay, well, I think that's all the questions that I have. Thank you again so much for all the work that you that your employees are doing. And I'm looking forward to see how you can achieve the goals that you have set forth to try to make service delivery a little. more efficient and helpful for folks and know that as council program, Tamara Campbell said, you know, city council has been paying attention to this. We're very interested in it for our constituents and want to make sure that we're also being good partners and helpful to our friends at Denver Motor Vehicle. And so we're here to also be in partnership. And thank you so much for everything that you're doing. With that said, colleagues, we have 27 items on consent. I know that's a lot. Nobody has called them off. Please read through them all before we get to the full body. Those will be going to the full body. And with that said, we are adjourned.

Thank you.