Michigan’s Secretary of State promised 30-minute waits — lines are worse

April 2021: Renewing plates, licenses in Michigan can take months, despite promises

MASON—Sheryl and Neil Lightner stepped outside Mason’s packed Secretary of State branch office last Tuesday to grab a smoke. They’d already waited more than an hour to renew a driver's license and get new plate tabs, and there were still 24 people ahead of them.

The Lightners needed to get outside, but they couldn’t really leave.  

“You never know when your number will be called,” Neil Lightner said. “You don’t want to miss it.”

The Lightners have plenty of company. 

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson promised during her 2018 campaign that she'd work to ensure customers at SOS branch offices would wait 30 minutes or less if she was elected. But wait times have increased, at several branches dramatically, in 2019. Average waits were higher nearly every month this year than over the past five years, according to data Bridge Magazine obtained from the department.  

In some of the state’s busiest offices, average wait times now exceed two hours: In Ann Arbor, it was 136 minutes in July; a Livonia office clocked in at 130 minutes in May. Further west, a Battle Creek office reached 90 minutes in February, while Flint’s wait was 98 minutes in June.

Benson and a top SOS official told Bridge they aren’t retreating from that pledge. They say the long waits are a result of years of what they describe as inefficient and inconsistent practices, and that structural changes are being made that may take time to yield results.

“We've seen a lot of short-term solutions over the years that have not been effective in reducing wait times and in some ways have made them longer,” Benson said. The department, she said, is looking for long-term solutions rather than short-term fixes.

In the meantime, she said, customers can ensure they receive help within 30 minutes by booking appointments through the MI-TIME online appointment system, rather than walking in to a branch without an appointment. Those who book a spot are seen quickly, she said.

But overall, wait times won’t come down overnight, said Chief Operations Officer Winnie Liao, a technology and management consultant who joined Benson’s team in January. “It’s going to take some time for us to get where we want to go,” Liao said. 

Among the promised upgrades to reduce frustrating lines is extending the office’s online appointment system to all branch offices, rather than only the state’s busiest offices. Officials say they are also streamlining services for high-volume customers like auto dealers and manufacturers. 

Related: Check out wait times at your Michigan Secretary of State offices

Staff will be held to goal metrics and may undergo more training in order to meet them, which would temporarily take them away from serving customers with the goal of providing better service long-term, Benson said. However, it’s hard to estimate when times will begin to trend down.

Liao also cited other factors contributing to wait times, including understaffing and the crunch of an impending federal deadline to update security measures on residents’ ID cards.

Meanwhile, Michiganders indulge the familiar ritual of squandering their afternoons to update a driver’s license.

Wait times longer, vary by location

Wait times at Michigan Secretary of State offices have been climbing for years. Though they have grown more slowly in 2019 than in the past, they still have grown. Viewed statewide, waits are around 15 minutes longer on average than for the same period last year ‒ from roughly 30 to 45 minutes, records show.

But that average can obscure wild variations depending on the branch. People living in high-population areas are more likely than others to face a hellish wait. 

In southeast Michigan, where wait times are longest, average waits went from about 54 minutes to around 70 or 80 depending on the region. 

Those who frequented the Novi location in July (the state’s busiest branch at one of the busiest times of the year) spent two hours on average waiting to be seen in 2018. In the first seven months of 2019, that climbed to around three hours. 

That’s far longer than waits for Mason branch customers last week. Ed Goodknecht said he had waited around an hour, despite getting a leg up from someone who left the line in desperation and gave him their spot. “It’s ridiculously busy in there,” he said.

Part of the frustration for those in busier branches is not knowing how long their wait will last. The part of the MI-TIME online system that estimates wait times at highly trafficked branches has been down since early March, when the department took it offline for improvements, citing inaccuracies. (MI-TIME can still be used to virtually reserve your place in line or make appointments, however.)  

Northern Michiganders have it better at their 20 branches: Those who visited a branch in the Upper Peninsula or northern Lower Peninsula (the state’s least busy regions) in July 2018 experienced average waits of around 10 minutes. In 2019, that time grew to 17 minutes. 

So, what’s going on?

Benson’s office points to numerous obstacles it’s working through.  

The number of branch office workers has decreased significantly over the last several years as a result of cost-saving efforts, Liao said. General Fund appropriations to the department have been cut twice in the last five fiscal years and eight times over the past two decades. 

Ruth Johnson, Benson’s predecessor who is now a state senator, agrees the department is short-staffed, particularly in the busiest branches. “There’s a lot of turnover with new hires because these jobs are very demanding,” she said. “Plus, the economy’s so good right now, a lot of them have other options.”

A shift to more security-conscious identification cards is also contributing to the crunch at branch offices in Michigan and other states, Liao said. Michiganders have an October 2020 deadline to comply with the REAL ID Act, a federal law crafted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that creates national standards for driver’s licenses and other IDs. While the state has been issuing REAL ID-compliant licenses since 2017, the department expects more people to come in for updates, even if their license is not up for renewal, to avoid security problems at places like airports.

Liao also noted more people use the MI-TIME system to get in line at the state’s 43 busiest branches. While customers like the tool, Liao said making it available only at high-use branches may have had the unintended effect of making those branches even busier. 

“The causes for long wait times differ in almost every one of our offices,” Benson said. 

The big February delay

Customers visiting branch offices in February and March likely faced greater frustration. February 2019 saw a huge spike in waits ‒ a nearly 45 percent increase, compared to a 13 percent increase the year before. 

Officials blame the rollout of the first phase of a $68.6 million new computer system known as “CARS,” which the department uses to process vehicle liens, titles, registrations and renewals electronically. The project has been in process since 2017.

Both Benson’s office and former Secretary of State Johnson agree the upgrade is long overdue ‒ staff had been using a decades-old computer system. They also agreed that launching it in February, one of the busiest times of year, was a poor choice and was partially to blame for delays. 

But that’s where the agreement ends. Benson, a Democrat, and Johnson, a Republican, each blame the other for deciding when to roll out the CARS system. 

“The decision was made by the current administration to move forward with the launch of the new system for the vehicle transactions in February,” Johnson told Bridge. “But we’ve heard that maybe it didn’t undergo rigorous enough testing and that there were dozens of issues that didn’t get sorted out until after the fact.”

Liao, Benson’s COO, recalls it differently. “The date was set when we walked in the door … we’re still not sure why the decision was made to launch CARS during one of the busiest seasons of the year,” Liao said. But, she added, “we’ve stopped the bleeding and now we’re working on bringing the wait times down.”

Benson said her office’s eventual success in shortening office lines will depend on a host of improvements, developed over time. 

“We’re trying to avoid making decisions based on what’s going to get us good press and instead making decisions based on what’s going to reduce the wait times, and sometimes those are two different things.”  

Introducing self-service kiosks and expanding the MI-TIME online system isn’t enough to make lasting change, she said. “Reducing wait times means really redefining how we’re delivering state services.”

A big part of that is broadening options for accomplishing tasks usually handled at branch offices. 

Among the department’s priorities:  

• Extending the MI-TIME appointment system to all of the state’s branch offices
• Improving the reliability and usefulness of self-serve kiosks (similar to an ATM for renewing tabs)
• Streamlining services for high-volume customers such as auto dealers
• Upgrading online services, such as adding a customized list of documents people will need when they arrive for an appointment to its website  

Benson said the appointment system, which is now available at nearly all of the offices, is a guaranteed way to get in and out in 30 minutes already. 

“I’m confident that the improvements we’re talking about and the work that we’re doing is going to collectively get us to where we need to be, which is that goal of the 30-minute guarantee,” Benson said. “We’re going to get there as quickly as possible but we’re going to do it right.”

Johnson said she’s skeptical. She noted that the methodology for measuring wait times is based on averages, which is different than guaranteeing everyone can be in and out of the branch in less than 30 minutes. She questioned whether Benson’s campaign promise is even do-able. 

“It simply is not realistic,” Johnson told Bridge. “So people who come in have this expectation (of being seen in 30 minutes) and then they’re angry at the staff.” She said there will always be unforeseen delays, such as a sick employee or holidays that concentrate traffic in a shortened workweek. 

Benson said she is undeterred. 

"[I am] someone who likes to set high and ambitious expectations and meet them,” she said. “It’s not easy and it’s not always pretty but I think it’s the only way we can get to the real systemic change and modernization that we need to get to.”