Sheriff bashes transportation department for long DMV wait times. What happened?
If you had an appointment at the driver’s license office in Caldwell this week, chances are you encountered long wait times and maybe even a canceled appointment.
Canyon County Sheriff Kieran Donahue said the issues were due to a malfunction in the Idaho Transportation Department software that made it difficult, and at times impossible, to take driver’s license photos and issue new licenses.
Problems with the software, GEMCapture, led to two full days of delays in the Canyon County driver’s license offices. The office stopped taking walk-in appointments Thursday morning and stopped taking appointments by 2:30 p.m, Donahue told the Idaho Statesman by phone. By Friday morning, Canyon County spokesperson Joe Decker said the system was functioning properly.
Idaho contracts sheriff’s departments to run the driver’s license offices within the Department of Motor Vehicles, while county assessors are in charge of the registration portion of the offices.
“The sheriffs of Idaho are legislatively mandated to provide driver’s license services to our citizens,” Donahue said in a news release. “It is a responsibility we take very seriously. And yet, once again, the state’s system we rely on to process transactions is failing the citizens of Idaho.”
ITD software malfunctions due to office move
Donahue called the malfunctions “unacceptable.”
“We have no other options other than use their system, but when it fails, the Sheriffs and their driver’s license office staff are the ones left holding the bag,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Idaho Transportation Department did not respond to requests for comment.
But in an email Donahue received, and provided to the Statesman, ITD said the issues occurred because ITD moved servers from an old State Street building to its new Chinden campus. In the latest move between offices, ITD said workers accidentally left the county servers at the State Street office while bringing the GEMCapture Fileshare system to the Chinden campus.
On Thursday night, ITD planned to move the fileshare system back to State Street to “mitigate the current latency issues,” the email said. But the email also said sheriffs should expect the delays with the system to continue through June as ITD moves offices.
Sheriffs get mixed messages from ITD
Donahue said the sheriffs were not informed of the issues until after many had complained to ITD about the DMV office delays. In his statement, Donahue said ITD told one Idaho sheriff to issue temporary licenses without a photo or signature.
“The sheriff, of course, refused to issue what would be a useless and unusable driver’s license,” Donahue said.
He called the miscommunication a concerning “lack of transparency from the state and ITD.”
Ada County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Patrick Orr said Thursday that its driver’s license offices were experiencing some delays but were still taking appointments and issuing licenses.
“The thing that takes your picture is down or is really slow,” Orr said by phone. “Instead of taking seconds, it is taking 10 minutes.”
ITD has history of DMV software issues
This is not the first instance that Idaho counties struggled with malfunctioning ITD software at their DMV offices.
In 2020, motor vehicle’s offices experienced long delays after ITD rolled out the new Gem System. County assessors said the system was not tested properly before it was rolled out. Before that, in 2018 ITD tried to use other system software, which led to long DMV delays and even involvement from then-Gov. Butch Otter.
“I don’t want to say this time it is catastrophic, like it was four or five years ago with the entire state shut down for weeks and weeks,” Donahue said by phone Thursday. “But it’s second place to it.”
This story was originally published June 2, 2023 at 1:03 PM with the headline "Sheriff bashes transportation department for long DMV wait times. What happened?."
