Oregon DMV Office Closures

The people of Corvallis and the workers at the Corvallis DMV field office found out at the same time that their DMV office would be closing indefinitely. The workers at the Grants Pass DMV office found out when the landlord put up a For Sale/For Lease sign. For Corvallis that will be a month and three weeks prior to the closure, for Grants Pass that will be two months and two weeks prior to their closure. Is this good management?

After negotiations with the landlord who owns both properties, and two other offices, broke down, DMV decided to close the offices and move to different locations. Was this a sudden occurrence? Was there no warning? The previous lease agreements were for 10 years, it was no secret when the lease would be up. In fact, DMV negotiated a 6 month extension for both properties. If the landlord had raised his fees, it makes sense to move the offices and save the state some money, but DMV management knew this as early as the summer of 2008. DMV workers found out a year later.

DMV workers aren’t being told what is going on. Grants Pass and Corvallis workers just found out this past week what their assignments will be when the offices close. They still can’t get a straight answer about whether or not they will be reimbursed for time or mileage, even though they have a labor agreement which states they will. Lack of information and disrespect for employees has lead to a great deal of gossip and rumor. Workers learned from the paper that the Corvallis Office lease actually expired in the spring and that DMV was given a 6 month extension on the lease; they didn’t learn this from DMV management. Stephanie Miles, Field Services Group Manager, didn't share this with workers and refused to share any more information about up coming plans for new offices or the remaining two offices owned by the same landlord. Workers are not mushrooms, they do not need to be kept in the dark. They can be an organization’s most valuable resource, but DMV will never be a high performing organization until it recognizes this. DMV business partners receive more respect that do the workers who should be treated like an important and respected partner in the delivery of services to the citizens of Oregon. A simple heads up that there was a problem a year and a half ago and regular updates would have gone a long way to dispel the rumors and gossip that is now being complained about and would have made the workers feel, at least to some degree, that they were being included and were part of the equation .

This situation shows a lack of planning on the part of management and a lack of consideration for the inconvenience this will cause to the citizens who depend on the services provided by DMV. It appears there have been lease problems for a year to a year and a half, depending on which DMV manager you ask. It seems that should have been ample time to locate a new site so that services would not be interrupted in the Corvallis and Grants Pass areas. Closing an office for an indeterminate amount of time due to loosing a lease has never been done before that we are aware of. Stephanie Miles has given conflicting information on whether or not they are looking at closing Bend or West Eugene, the other two properties owned by the same landlord. On one hand, she has told employees they are looking at temporary sites, on the other she says they are still negotiating with the landlord. At least these workers have a heads up that they may be facing closures. The communities have yet to find out.

Customers in these communities will now have to leave their cities to do their DMV business. Auto dealers who depend on the local offices to process their title work will have to do the same. This comes at a time when the legislature has passed a fee increase in the form of the Oregon Transportation Act. The Corvallis Gazette Times gave DMV a "Raspberry" award for bad planning.

Workers in these offices will be farmed out to various surrounding offices and are just now being notified which ones. They must be compensated for travel time and mileage, to not do so would be a serious contract violation, yet Stephanie Miles will not provide this assurance to her workers. She states they are looking at where employees live to make this less stressful on the workers and that is good management. However, workers often choose to live where they work. At least two Grants Pass employees who choose to work and live in Grants Pass do so because they have family there, they can be close to their children, and deal with the daily situations that come up more easily. Workers in surrounding offices will now be picking up the extra customer workload, shuffling of equipment and inventory is going on, and the customers will be paying new fee increases on top of driving a longer distance for the services provided by DMV.

The workers at DMV are of the opinion that closing these offices will have a severe impact on the services provided to the citizens of Oregon who live in these communities. One can only imagine how much this will cost when all is said and done. It is certain that the workers in these offices have lost faith in the ability of DMV management to make sound business decisions. It is also certain that these workers know they are nothing more than a cog in the wheel and are not valued assets to the machine that is DMV.