DMV staffing issues affecting available appointments

The Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles is experiencing staffing issues that are leading to a lack of available office appointments.

The department’s Southern Nevada offices have 52 vacancies, with 173 vacancies total seen statewide, according to DMV spokesman Kevin Malone. The DMV is authorized to have a staff of 1,239 employees.

Those vacancies aren’t for a dearth of interested candidates, but more so difficulty keeping hired employees already on staff.

“The issue is not a lack of applicants, it is retention,” Malone said in an email. “The pay raises being considered in this year’s legislative session would help greatly.”

Anyone interested in a position within the DMV may apply on the department’s website at www.dmv.nv.gov/jobs.

New hires go through two months of required training before an employee is ready to work on their own.

“Much of the eight weeks is spent serving customers under close supervision,” Malone said.

Another continued issue affecting available appointments is people with assigned times not showing up. The no-show rate at DMV offices sits at nearly 46 percent, according to Malone.

“We ask customers to keep their appointment or cancel it,” Malone said. “If they are not able to keep the appointment, they should take a moment to go back to the website to cancel it.”

When an appointment is canceled via the website, that time slot opens up immediately to other customers.

The appointments are crucial as the DMV is in year two of a four-year process of making the majority of its services available online. That will allow for motorists to skip going into a office altogether. The revamped DMV website and chatbot are the first visible results of the push. When completed, nearly every DMV transaction will be available online. .

“We estimate that 200,000 people per year choose to go to a DMV office when they could complete the transaction online,” Malone said. “We have a usage rate of only about 50 percent for online driver’s license renewals. Motorists can register vehicles purchased from a Nevada dealer online and the usage rate for that transaction is also about 50 percent.”

Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on Twitter.