FRESNO (KMJ) – Governor Gavin Newsom in Sanger, talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles.
His remarks coming the same day DMV offices statewide were shutdown until early afternoon, while its employees underwent additional training.
Newsom says he was personally at the DMV yesterday, as a customer, to get his Real ID.
“I sat in the chair with about a hundred other folks, and we were out of there in a reasonable amount of time, so that was encouraging,” Newsom said.
It’s a day after a report by Newsom’s strike team detailed challenges at the department, the governor plans to reinvent it by focusing on better customer service, accepting credit cards, hiring more employees and adding self-service kiosks.
“We’ve invested an extraordinary amount of time and money into improving the operations, it’s going to be a multi-year process,” Newsom said.
But critics like Assemblyman Jim Patterson say Newsom’s ideas don’t go far enough to fix the agency.
