I was at the South Brunswick office of the NJ Motor Vehicles Commission this morning to register my mother’s new car. MVC offices were closed for several weeks at the height of the pandemic, which resulted in a backlog of demand. I’d read about how long the lines have been since the MVC reopened, but this was my first opportunity to stand in one of those lines.
To deal with the backlog, the MVC developed procedures for efficiently processing large numbers of customers. Step 1 is waiting in line — socially distanced and wearing a mask — to get a number. Then you wait in your car until they text you saying they’re ready for you to come back.
This was my second visit to the MVC in two days. When I went yesterday at about 11am I was told they’d given out all the numbers for the day and that I’d need to come back another day.
The office opens at 8am so I went back this morning at 7:45. At that point the line already wrapped all around the building and well out into the parking lot. I overheard one woman say that her boyfriend had been there all night holding a place for her — and she was 39th in line.
I stood in line until 10am to get my number and collect the forms I would need to fill out. Then I waited in my car until I received a text summoning me back. That came at 10:39am.
When I returned to the building I was shown to a spot where I could stand and wait to go inside. Fifteen minutes later I was ushered into the building with a group of seven other people. We stood in line again to check in at a reception desk, then took one of about 20 seats in the waiting room, all spaced well over six feet apart.
I sat for half an hour and then, when my number was called, went to one of the service windows to handle my business. Total time from when I arrived until I was served was three hours and forty minutes.
But there was a problem. (Isn’t there always?) The clerk told me that because the Power of Attorney document I presented was a copy and not an original, I would not be able to obtain a vehicle registration on my mother’s behalf. I would either need to bring in an original signed Power of Attorney or come back with my mother. Since any original Power of Attorney was sitting in a file drawer at the office of my mother’s lawyer in Connecticut, where she was living at the time it was executed, I told the clerk that I would need to come back with my mother but asked whether there was any way of avoiding making her wait in line for three-plus hours. The clerk wrote a note on a Post-It, gave it to me and said I could use it come back in without waiting.
So home I went to eat lunch and retrieve my mother. We arrived back at the MVC office at about 1:30, and were dismayed to see that it was all but deserted. I had confirmed that the place was open until 3pm on Saturdays, but it looked at first as if I had been misinformed. There were just three cars in the lot. But as we got closer to the building we saw that there were lights on and employees — though no customers — inside. The door was locked so I knocked on the window near where a security guard was sitting. I showed him my Post-It Note through the glass and he came to the door and let us in. The woman at the reception desk gave us a new number and asked us to sit down, but since we were the only customers in the building we hadn’t even taken a seat before the automated voice on the P.A. system announced our number and summoned us to one of the service windows. We were finished 15 minutes later.
So on this particular day, this particular MVC office didn’t give out nearly enough numbers to keep the office working all day. They gave out few enough numbers that everybody who had one was out of there at least a couple of hours before close of business.
I can’t help but wonder: could it be that the MVC’s backlog from their spring closing has actually been cleared up, and that now the staff are using the commission’s new, hyper-efficient procedures not to shorten wait times for customers but rather to get them all in and out in half a day? I overheard a staffer suggest to someone who arrived too late to get a number that he come back next time at 5am. 5:00! When the office doesn’t even open until 8! So everyone is obliged to arrive super-early and stand in line for hours, but by shortly after lunch the place is empty and the staff gets to kick back?
My next step will be finding out how to contact my representatives in the NJ state legislature to share my observations.