Monday, January 21, 2013

The State Division of Motor Vehicles has a new Commissioner

Steve Dale has taken the reins of the State Division of Motor Vehicles.  He takes over as the Acting Commissioner following last week’s retirement of Commissioner Joe Miller.
“I have some big shoes to fill,” said Dale.
Dale may be new to his title, but he’s long been engrained in the woodwork of the DMV.
“When I first started we had only a regional office in Martinsburg and another in Winfield and then the headquarters in Charleston with people lined up around the building,” he said.
Today there are 23 regional DMV offices and one more about to open in Summersville.  Dale says it’s been a huge benefit to the people of West Virginia to go to a local office instead of taking a trip to Charleston or relying on the mail to handle business with the agency.
Dale takes over at a time when the DMV is in the process of a technology upgrade which his predecessor put in place.
“Right now we have three legacy, self standing systems that do not interact,” said Dale. “The drivers license system, the vehicle system, and the cash register simply don’t communicate with each other.”
Dale says the work is underway to remedy the problem and the DMV feels strongly about implementation of the Real ID system which started last year with a lot of complaints.
“We’ve completed the first year of that five-year rollout and we’ve gotten about 95-percent of the bugs worked out,” he said.