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.

Travis Brinks

tbrinks@wvradio.com
@BrinksTravis
Travis graduated from PCC with a Bachelors degree in Broadcasting and shortly after moved to Charleston to take his first full-time radio job at MetroNews and WCHS-AM.
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Comments

  • WV Patriot

    What technological advances? Virginia has been doing on-line license renewals for 10 years. Our DMV is a joke and I don't see anything changing.

    January 21, 2013 at 9:18 am | Reply Report comment

  • ShinnstonGuy

    We now have 23 regional offices? That is ridiculous for a state with 1.8 million people or less. This is a tremendous waste of resources! For goodness' sakes, if they trained the people that work there how to do their job, they could easily handle double the workload in half the time. As it is, at least at the Bridgeport branch, only ONE employee knows how to do anything. The rest say, "I have to ask my supervisor." Well worth it, bravo state government.

    January 22, 2013 at 5:56 pm | Reply Report comment